


Ill met by Moonlight, Proud Serenity:

by TheLightdancer



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Genre: Alternate Princess Serenity, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Bisexual Tenoh Haruka, But this time very much closer to manga/anime mashup, F/F, F/M, Haruka/Mamoru is heresy, Heresy gets a BLAMMing., M/M, Not Haruka/Mamoru, Sailor Moon Grimdark, alternate Senshi awakening sequences, reincarnation gone horribly right
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:41:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 19
Words: 59,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28052610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: In an alternate universe Queen Serenity's daughter, whose secret wishes are very different from the being her mother wished, is reborn as another person to Tsukino Usagi, the reborn Senshi of the Moon whose task is above all else to be the guardian of the Princess. When the Princess is reborn, an old enemy stirs in the Arctic and the world is plunged into a sequence of crises culminating in the return of the Great Enemy, and the Golden Queen its destined servant.
Relationships: Aino Minako & Tenoh Haruka, Artemis/Luna (Sailor Moon), Chiba Mamoru & Tenoh Haruka, Chiba Mamoru/Tsukino Usagi, Kaiou Michiru/Tenoh Haruka, Kunzite/Zoisite, Meiou Setsuna & Tenoh Haruka, Prince Endymion/Princess Serenity, Senshi/Shitennou
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7





	1. End of an Age, Prologue:

_Prologue Part I, Galaxy Cauldron before the end of the Silver Millennium:_

She was a Golden Queen who had fought and vanquished everything she had faced. The great enemy of the Sailor Wars, mightiest of all Senshi who had ever been or would ever be. Only one figure, the brilliant and shining Queen of the Lunar Imperium, had faced her as an equal and banished her. She had done that here, at the heart of all that is, and the envy and hatred Galaxia felt when encountering what she'd believed she'd always wanted had at last sundered the prison on something much more menacing. Sealed here by her predecessor, Sailor Andromeda, who had given her life before being reincarnated.

It was a force of Nothingness, of malevolence and hunger, the evil things in existence. Malice oozed from it and frost rimed around the areas of the Cauldron as Chaos stood before her, a towering thing in the antithesis of the Senshi. Where they, even her, were beautiful without compare, wearing armor that ranged from her full-fledged armor to the barely-present armor of the Kinmoku-Senshi who seemed more dominatrixes than Senshi (her shoulder throbbed where Sailor Star Fighter, a being with red hair and a long ponytail with it had hurled a powerful attack that had shattered her pauldron before her blade had put an end to that so she knew she could not dismiss them lightly)....this thing wore a heavy suit of plate armor. It seemed more a weapon of war than a being, face made of an endless night with two gleaming eyes that shone and shone brilliantly, the light awe-inspiring.

Her armor was shattered, she had tried to defeat the Chaos-entity that had emerged when that Queen Serenity had departed with a different kind of glow, and that envy had grown still sharper.

Chaos's gaze was unkind and amused as it looked at her.

"I pledge to you my service, that the greater schemes be unleashed. We shall make the Galaxy burn, and the heavens bleed."

Chaos grinned and spoke:

As you have said it, so then shall it be.

Her armor now had bracelets on it, symbols that bound her to Chaos as all else was, and from that moment in a sudden act of frenzied madness she tossed her star-seed into the cauldron. She retained her powers but was now a soulless queen, eyes turned to Chaos with secret treacheries lurking within them. She would find her opportunity to lure Chaos and the being that had bested her back here, and then she would kill them all.

And then the Cauldron and its magic would be hers to bestow and to wield with impunity.

_Luna, beginning of the Silver Millennium:_

Nine beings knelt before the infant princess, whose dark blue eyes shone with a brilliant light. They were the Senshi, the immortal warrior-guardians who fought against Chaos, the Senshi of the new generation that would follow when Queen Serenity at last cast off her own life and let her newborn daughter lead. Stoic Mercury, visor up with brilliant blue hair. Dour and brutal Venus, her gaze like flint and her posture and presence fixed, knowing that so tiny a being hinged the fate of nine worlds and perhaps of all existence were the hidden words of Mars and of Pluto truthful. The Senshi of the Moon, whose hair was styled in a mirror of the Queen's, and who unknown to all of them wore armor in a mirror of the being whose star-seed was so intimately connected to her known, her eyes shining with warm light and compassion. Jupiter the Thunderer, whose being crackled with the lightning that was hers to wield and to shape as she would. Saturn the Queen of Death and Rebirth, whose glaive remained against the wall next to the time staff, eyes soft and compassionate, a gaze kindly and yet her very being pulsed with a power beyond the rest. Uranus, whose eyes were a mirror of the princess's, and who noticed certain similarities with a raised eyebrow, her power of the Seven Winds giving her a bit of restlessness.

And beyond them all, the only one who stood with her hands crossed in front of her chest, garnet-eyed Pluto, whose crimson gaze betrayed deep sorrows that she knew and spoke of to none, even Queen Serenity. She had knelt before the rest had arrived.

Oaths were sworn in secret, souls and magic tied, and in that moment all else followed.

_The End of the Silver Millennium:_

Serenity looked at her forbidden lover, her hair cropped short, against the will of her mother. For so long had Queen Serenity demanded a daughter wrought in her image and in her likeness. Flowing dresses and long hair style in her mother's image. She had rebelled against this in secret, welcomed by eyes as kind as the immensity of her sphere, an aquamarine hue that haunted her dreams and her longings and would haunt the future being who was to be born and reshaped anew. She had exchanged the flowing dress for a more militarized uniform, for that was the alternative, in the fashion of Prince Endymion's Shitennou. She knew that the Senshi of the Moon had these ties, and she envied her them, even as she knew this love no less forbidden had led to harsh punishments.

A briny odor on the air and lips met, tenderly, and then came mad laughter and darkness billowing across the skies, the image of her betrothed damned like her to a true love whom they had to make such furtive exchanges to meet imprinted on her eyes. They did not love each other, but they had this tie and they knew that it was there and it was something that marked them for this life, and they feared the next as well. He spoke to her a warning and a name that was accursed. Beryl, prophet of the so-called Solar Queen, Metallia, the foul beast at the heart of the Sun. The Earth had fallen and the other planets were ringed by the shadowy malice of a thing that was not shadows or darkness in truth. It was Hunger, it was Envy, it was Hate. The force that had vowed to dance on their graves. 

Blades flashed, armies fought and blood was spilled in the hallowed halls of the Lunar Palace. The two pairs of Forbidden lovers fought side by side, but against the sheer force of what opposed them they could do nothing, and the last memories of Serenity were a blade in her heart and the mocking laughter of Queen Beryl and the anguished scream of her love, the sudden billowing power of the Ocean that hurled the sorceress-queen aside, and then a glimpse of three beings walking and sorrowful words spoken, and then a sharp thing fell and there was nothing but a benediction and a valediction from her mother and one last cry of power.

_Tokyo, Tenoh Household, 1993:_

Tenoh Haruka sat up, gasping and holding her head which throbbed fiercely with a pain and a light she refused to admit was there. It always glowed on a full moon and she had never understood that, did not want to understand it. 

The dream again. The blade and the darkness and the smell of the ocean (she wondered if this was why she'd begged her papa for a house near the ocean but she liked to think not). Her chest had a single spike of pain as it always did, but there was nothing. Only a home fit for a runner whose speed was like that of the seven winds themselves.

She shivered, a single tear falling from her eyes, and fell back into a slumber where more terrible nightmares awaited, dreams of a shining palace on the moon and then darkness falling and dimming the light of the Sun and the appearance of a fell queen with red hair.

_D Point, Arctic Circle:_

Four lords knelt before a red-haired queen on a great throne.

"She has awakened," Beryl spoke. "Somewhere, out there. The Princess of the Moon has returned. The old witch was able to bring her to the future as well as Metalia us. We shall find her, and we shall take from her beating heart that power that animates her, and then shall destiny be made aright."

Her eyes gleamed.

"I shall have my Endymion, Metalia shall reign, and the false Golden Queen shall kneel before the true might of the Queen of Sol, mistress of all the known universe!"

Their fists hammered against their chests, and they said nothing.

Beryl turned to an orb that granted her sight.

"The first of the Youma shall be ready soon, and we shall send it to fight."

"And if the Senshi of the Moon awakened as well as her princess?"

Beryl shrugged. "We already face the general of the Senshi, and there are rumors the Ocean Queen has returned, too. They are dangerous but they do not threaten us."

Her gaze turned to shadows where her mightiest servants remained and there was a cold and cruel smile on her face.

"Nothing can. Go then, my good and faithful servants. Ace failed against that Sailor V, and he reaped his reward for all of his troubles. If you fail me, you had best pray the Senshi kill you before I do."

Her gaze turned. "Jadeite, with the failure of Ace, you are go to next. Go forth and fight, draw energy. The time of Metalia's return draws nigh, and it would be best for us all that we offer to her proof of loyalty, for in that loyalty is survival."

Jadeite nodded and walked to the teleportation homer, vanishing in a brilliant flash of light with an ozone odor following.

Beryl smiled, viciously. V might have shaved some hair from her head, but her power remained intact. Destiny had fixed its claws upon her, and it would be all that she wished it be.


	2. The Dawn:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tenoh Haruka has a very strange day. 
> 
> Tsukino Usagi encounters a tall blonde who puzzles her and entrances her, a monster in the shadows, and both of them encounter a talking cat.

_On the road to Juuban Junior High:_

It was a day that would come to redefine the destiny of the Earth for a long period of time stretching into millions of years. 

Often the being that stood near the Galaxy Cauldron with hair no longer in the strange odango hairstyle her mother had wished her to wear and forced her into it, but in a single blonde ponytail that draped down her back let herself reflect on that. A time when she had believed herself to be human, before Crystal Tokyo and the reign of her daughter and of her granddaughter down to the ninth generation, when _it_ had returned. And a new generation of Sailor Wars set in, not against the lesser manifestations of the beast but the beast itself. She was the last, in her Galaxy. Only the people of Kinmoku preserved a world at all, and there was a bitter wintry smile there of old enmities that even now had never truly lain to rest.

She was Sailor Cosmos, overseer of the Cauldron where stars were born, the beating heart of magic and splendor in the universe. She was immortal, she had lived three billion years and would keep on doing so, Earth's planetary system long ashes in the burning red light of the Sun. Metalia's vengeance come round at last.

She had faced many things, and it was harsh and it was cruel to remember those days of illusions (eyes flickering to two small tombs marked in Kanji and Romaji, the names _Artemis_ and _Luna_ present. They had never been immortal, merely long-lived) and what it had meant, then. If she had known this......she liked to think she would have still made the decisions. No, she knew she would. There was a Dark and it hungered and it lusted for life, for all that life meant for itself. It did not understand that life save as a thing to lay waste to and to destroy.

If not for her the Galaxy would have burned and bled and become an empty set of tombs. Now, there was still life, new species born, new Senshi drawn to them.

Life, preserved. The foulness that had once dwelt here cast to skulk in the shadows, gnawing at itself impotently.

She was mighty, now, and ancient. The oldest of the Senshi, in truth the successor (with far greater success) of the Golden Queen who endured and became at times the prevailing spirit of Senshi in Ages of Strife. She was mighty and old beyond the oldest standards of being and yet, her Talisman once a shorter semi-scimitar now reshaped as a great Zweihander in the deeper recesses of the past a billion years ago to mark the end of a later set of Senshi Wars and renamed _Kusanagi_ a long, long time ago when she had fought in this same place against a monster in golden armor before the hungry eyes of Emptiness itself, in its scabbard dug into the ground. Ancient, and yet she dreamed of being a young woman, who had loved and who loved, and who had believed herself born to live and to age and to die as others did.

\--------

Tenoh Haruka had awoken from the bad dreams twice that night. A blade in the heart and the image of a sorceress in a blue dress with hair of fire and eyes that gleamed like it. The word "Endymion" which had been met with bemusement, scorn, amusement, all in the same sudden impulse. The smell of the ocean and eyes of aquamarine.

She blinked, her eyes tear-streaked.

She shook her head, and clinically dressed herself. She was fond to dress in a more masculine fashion, though she wore skirts and more feminine outfits occasionally to a point that she was not entirely butch. Mostly, yes. Not entirely. She was not like anyone else, she was herself, and that was all she was and all she would be. She slipped on her pants, not bothering to notice what kind of underwear she wore that day, for it was next to nothing. She had gone to therapy to try to exorcise the terrible dreams but nothing worked. Medication did not work (and so it had quietly been stopped). The dreams were there, not changing in intensity, and they gave her bags under her eyes.

She dipped her head into a sink, washing her face, the coolness of water on her skin soothing, for it meant the strange dreams receded and in water there was comfort, though only salt water could bring the broader kind that she truly wished.

Drying her hands, she slipped on her schoolbag, and began to walk to school, humming an old ditty from one of her dreams. She was no singer, though she had an effortless harmony, and when she was distracted she had almost a regal grace to her.

She was lost in her own world, old and terrible dreams afflicting her when she heard a tumult ahead of her.

\--------

Tsukino Usagi had had the dream again. A battle in a shining palace on the Moon, fighting to protect her princess, releasing blasts of energy and yet the Nothingness could not be stopped. She had not, in the end, however, fought for the princess. She had fought for Endymion, declaring that the long months in that solitary chamber she was locked in would never dim who she was. In the end it didn't, a blade from one of his Shitennou did after he had slain his own lord and only then did the scales fall from his eyes and her last sight had been that of Kunzite throwing himself on his own blade, groaning in shame.

She had seen the Princess wailing in agony then as her own lover was stabbed by another blade, falling to her knees and then darkness.

The dream troubled her. She was a year away from high school, and though she was a bit clumsy, she displayed moments of....curiosity. Healing power that could restore her own body and that of others. Keener sight and appreciation of magick (she did not think of it that way. She knew when places felt like places of warmth that did not glow always with tangible light, for the Tomoe house in particular had a great shadow on it but it was one that healed and protected in its own ways) and when they were fell and sick and redolent with something that should never have been.

She had dreams of a Princess and a Palace on the Moon, of a set of friends led by her cousin, Sailor Venus, and of the strange Queen and the sometimes-bitter (much more than sometimes but her dreams only showed her this sometimes) relationship between ruler and heir.

It was like a fairy tale, the old kind, the kind where the wicked stepsisters danced to death in molten-hot shoes and where the sleeping princess was awakened when a child of rape drew a splinter from her finger and spat it out.

Distracted she yelped when she tripped over someone's foot without looking, her hands shielding her from bumping her head, and she looked then. There were a group of people here, four toughs in a street gang, and there was another person who turned and looked. She was older, at least a sophomore in high school, but she'd seen her often as they grew up. Mostly walking here.

The cat struggled and she saw that they'd placed a band-aid on its head and were taunting it, and she was angry.

"Hey! Leave it alone!"

The boys turned, and then one of them laughed, rudely.

"Fuck off, this is between us and this little mutant."

A voice cleared a throat, feminine but with a distinct aura of command that led them to turn their heads.

"Did you hear what she said? Leave the cat alone."

It was her not-quite-friend. A very tall and very annoyed-looking blonde woman with a severe look in her eyes, one that led them to panic and to flee, and then to her surprise (for they had only glimpsed one another) she saw the woman move with a speed that edged at the limit of superhuman, cautiously picking up the cat and gently removing the band-aid. She was surprised, as was the other woman, to see a sigil like an astrological sign gleaming on the cat's head, and the cat looking at them with a gaze far too intelligent for anything of truly Earth origin.

The taller woman shrugged and placed the cat down and gave her a little scritch on the head, and then resumed her walk.

Usagi smiled for a moment and then her smile froze.

"Hello, Odango," she glared. It was Chiba Mamoru, of all people. A boy she disliked more than most.

"Chiba-san," she said with a sweetness that would have deceived most and got a bark of laughter from him.

Before they could do more than speak, she saw the other woman moving on and his eyes flickered to see her and he turned back.

"I see you've met Tenoh."

"Who?"

"The other blonde."

He snorted. "Blondes. Great on the heart but empty in the head."

Usagi's glare went straight from sweet to venomous and she growled a sharp word of profanity at Chiba and stalked on with the affronted dignity of a cat, not unlike the cat she'd encountered that day.

From there the day proceeded as usual, hanging out with Naru, lessons that were boring even if necessary. She did well in her classes, to boot, so it made it still more pointless. She didn't always do well on tests but she never failed to _pass_ her class.

That evening, she had not yet awoken to her future or her destiny and she encountered a straight sight that made her think that instead of merely seeing almost human-like intelligence in a cat's eyes and a gleaming symbol on its forehead that she'd read one too many mangas.

\-----------

Tenoh Haruka was walking home from school that evening, quietly. There was nothing much going on that day than usual, running at the track and beating her rival Elsa Gray by progressively greater speeds. She had always been fast but not beyond the limits a human body could sustain. Now her speed was increasing, blurring into elements that no normal humanity could explain. She had had dreams of flying, too, but did not want to think too much about that given flying dreams were much more normal than nightmares of blades.

She walked along quietly and had then seen something strange. A woman had fallen to her knees, coughing and hacking and seeming to spit up blood. She had frozen then, feeling something very strange and terrifying. An aura of menace and shadows she'd felt around the world (and a presence of blazing light that seemed achingly familiar and she wondered at that but did not wonder past a point). Then it had been distant, thousands of miles away. Now it was here in front of her and she could almost taste it and choke upon it.

The woman had transformed into a creature that seemed to raise itself like a tree, a crimson star on its head.

 _For the Dark Kingdom,_ it crackled. _You are the first soul I have encountered and I, Morga, shall have your energy for the sake of Metalia, Queen of the Known Universe!_

She was paralyzed at first. No monster on a TV show, this was real and it gave a sense of terrible brooding menace. 

This was much more than a cat with a glowing symbol on its head.

A light shone in front of her, a thing appearing that looked like a small mace with a blue head adorned by a star. A brilliant light shone around it and the monster hissed in pain.

 _Impossible,_ it snarled, and then she grasped it and power surged through her in a brilliant light. She felt her clothes vanish (and flushed more than slightly) and was regarbed in an outfit that bothered her much more than she let on. There were earrings in her ear, white gloves with a blue fringe, high heeled boots, a blue skirt with an equally blue bow behind it, a collar that ended in a downward sloping blue V with a golden bow on it, and a tiara-like thing on her head that gleamed with a light that was....strange.

She spoke her transformation words, the words that airily permitted her to disregard and misinterpret dreams for reasons beyond the long flowing dresses and pigtails, as the power surged through her.

_Protected by Uranus, The Outer Planet of Wind, Guardian of the Heavens. I am Sailor Uranus!  
_

She stood before the Youma, body empowered by the Seven Winds, a cold smile on her face. 

There was a blade at her side, gleaming with a jeweled hilt, and she drew it instinctively.

"You are a monster, and a daughter of monsters. This is not your world or your sphere, you shall be cast where you belong!"

The blade flashed out and through the heart of the beast, and as it snarled:

 _I shall return, Guardian of the Seven Winds_ she saw for a moment a very confused girl with Odangos, and then with a sudden impulse drew herself back and found herself literally leaping over tall buildings in a single bound until she returned home.

It was an assertion of will to de-transform, and she unlocked her door to step in.

It did not take long to set on a record, and the sound of Kaiou Michiru's first album, a new set of classical music blending the best of traditional Japanese and Western music echoed. She let herself smile and went to the fridge to fix herself a meal. Well, 'fix' in this case meant heating up frozen stuff in the microwave but food was food.

She did not see that the cat she'd helped the other girl rescue had appeared on her windowsill, nor that she proved to be more magical than anyone might have expected and simply phased through the window, lounging there.

What did happen was when the cat spoke:

"So you're the first Senshi I've found" she quite literally slipped and fell on her tailbone and swore foully, thinking she was delusional. Cats didn't talk.

The cat cocked her head with a curious look of amusement on her face.

"Was it something I said?"

Tenoh Haruka's eyes went very, very wide.


	3. Ran's Mirror:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tenoh Haruka has a chat with a talking cat, and Sailor Uranus finds herself facing a new Youma when a cursed tarot deck leads her to encounter the creature Balm. 
> 
> And then her day gets stranger still.

_Tenoh Haruka's Bedroom:_

"Uh, yes," she stammered, not a tall able to rely on her usual suave mask. "It is indeed something you said. You see..um...cats can't talk." 

Luna smiled, a more human kind of smile that did not truly go on a cat's face.

"Oh I'm not a cat, not as you'd see it. I'm a female of a species called a Mau."

Her smile was, for all that, a warm one.

"It's a curious thing, though. I serve the Moon and its royal family." 

Her gaze traversed Tenoh Haruka, seeing the younger girl as fully what she was. Hair close-cropped, more of a butch than a tomboy.

Then again, as she remembered her, Serenity's hair had been oddly like that except that it was white and this one's hair was a dirty blonde.

"And yet...." she leaned forward. "That sword."

Haruka looked down for a moment almost stupidly, her gaze turning to the sword and then her eyes widening.

"I thought the blue mace thing was weird, but this..."

She pulled the blade out of its scabbard, and Luna's eyes went wide. The hilt was golden, adorned with various red gems bar a single aquamarine stone with another sigil inscribed in it, done in beautiful golden Lunarian by the hands of a masterful crafter. The blade was curved, more of a scimitar than a katana, and yet....

"That's the Space Sword. You're one of the Outer Senshi. But I was called to you."

She put her chin on her paws.

"I don't understand it, but I think I'll come to understand it in....in the future,"

Tenoh Haruka put the sword back in its scabbard.

"You said you're a Mau?"

The cat nodded.

"Yes. We are a species whose default form is somewhat in between yours and that of a cat."

"So....you're a catgirl."

Luna's gaze went to a bit more hostile territory and Haruka froze, sweatdropping for a moment. "Cat-woman, thank you."

Haruka's grin was slightly awkward and she tried a feeble joke. "I don't see Batman anywhere around here." 

The almost arctic chill from Luna's gaze led her not to try joking around her for a while.

Then words registered on her.

"Royal family? Moon?"

"Yes, at one point there was a kingdom built around the Moon. It had rulers, founded by Queen Mani in distant times, reaching its first glory under Queen Selene, and led in its last phase by Queen Serenity."

That latter word led Haruka to stiffen for a moment and she saw-

_A woman clad in white, hair long and flowing and white, whose gaze looked at her with worry and disappointment._

_"I don't want long hair!" She heard the shout._

_"It is the way of our family," the Queen's voice was cold. "And you will do as I command you to do. I did not have you called from the Cauldron to have you defy me."_

The moment faded and she blinked Another of _those_ dreams.

"It....fell."

Haruka looked up, though she could not feel the Moon through the sky. She could yet know a kind of light that glowed with a silver aspect and the winds responded to her as well, and she felt a strange kind of peace and yet tension all at once.

"How did it fall?"

"Back in the day, there were those who were loyal to the Dark Forces, and among the greatest of them was a monster called Beryl. She called into being those dark forces, and all I remember of that is seeing Kunzite come toward me with his blade before Queen Serenity banished him and sent Artemis in me in this shape to sleep."

She sighed. "I don't remember much of the Fall past that."

There was silence that stretched in the room.

Haruka found herself inclined to reach out and to stroke the cat, giving Luna some warmth that she felt returned by a deep purring sound, surprisingly deep from a body so seemingly small.

Another word used registered to her, then. 

"What's a Senshi?"

"in the past, there were nine guardians for nine spheres. Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Nine immortal beings who outwardly resembled perpetually young women. Mercury was Guardian of Machine and Water, Venus of Love and the commander of all the Senshi. The Senshi of the Moon was the shadow of the moon's princess, her faithful protector. Guardian Mars was a seer and a fighter, Guardian Jupiter the Guardian of Lightning. Guardian Saturn of Death and Rebirth, Guardian Uranus was the Mistress of the Seven Winds, Guardian Neptune was the mistress of the Ocean, and Guardian Pluto the protector of time."

Haruka looked, her eyes wide slightly/ "You said all that in one breath. I am impressed."

Luna snorted. "The Senshi are the protectors of the universe against the Great Enemy. You have a Talisman, something of the Outer Senshi."

"Outer Senshi?"

Luna smiled, a bit sadly. "There were two groups of Senshi, then. One was the five Inners, Mercury, Venus, Moon, Jupiter, and Mars. One was the four Outers, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The Inners guard the Princess, the Outers shielded the entire Solar System."

Haruka sat down, her chin on her knees, pulling her arms around her.

"They didn't seem to do a very good job."

Luna looked at her worried. "I don't think the fall was on them. It came from within, which is what the Inner Senshi should have sniffed out. They defeated all the outer enemies, and peace, the comfort and peace of the old Kingdom was on their shoulders."

Her gaze was now one truthfully that of a being of impossibly ancient times. For a moment Tenoh Haruka shivered under the scrutiny of such a being. "I have no idea why I've been called to you, rather than one of the Inner Senshi, but in truth I don't object to it. Back then there was a deep gulf between Inner and Outer, and I almost never saw them. They seemed more figures of myth, even then, than actual people."

Tenoh Haruka couldn't resist a single sharp bitter laugh.

"Well I'm no legend. And I'm certainly no princess. Don't believe me, just ask my father."

The cat leaned forward and brushed her cheek against her. "I haven't seen you much but I think you're too harsh on yourself."

Haruka didn't want to admit that she cried then, nor that the words spoken were ones she needed to hear much.

There were no races for a bit, the rumors of monsters lurking in the shadows spooking authorities and leading to a brief cancellation of extracurricular activities. She spent her afternoons and parts of her evening mastering both her transformation (realizing that where she or another Senshi would see the transformation sequence, all their foes would see would be a flash of light), her attacks _World Shaking_ and _Space Sword Blaster,_ and discovering that she'd been verging on the superhuman before and now she truly was. She was _fast,_ a fly beating its wings in individual beats seemed slow next to her and if she wasn't careful the sheer pressure of her motions could carry their own kind of wind and streaks of friction-flames with it.

And beyond that, _she could fly._ She had discovered that when she sought to take a leap with her newly enhanced strength and then did not _fall_ and then she was hovering in the air, seeing Tokyo's lights at night. Cities were more beautiful in the dark than under the light of the Sun, and she felt the coolness of the night air, and then it occurred to her she was _flying_ and then she managed to traverse overall of Japan and then still faster, covering across the northern world from Japan over Russia-Canada-Russia and back to Japan. She was sure she'd spooked the Russian and Canadian Air Forces but they hadn't had the chances to do anything about an impossibly fast human-sized flying object.

She went to the South, too, traversing over Pakistan and India and Africa and the immensity of the Pacific, glorying in her new speed. She'd only thought she knew what speed was as Tenoh Haruka. Here, she was free. Something in her, a hidden face that looked through her eyes, rejoiced and even wept in tears. No more gilded cages, no more furtive sneaking to her lover, whom had risked so much to be with her, and did so. She did not know those thoughts nor that face, nor would she have cared to know. All she knew was that there was a part of her that felt that freedom and encouraged her to be faster, freer.

A wind that could not be caged, not a bird chirping in a gilded cage and finding rebellion in cropped hair and a martial outfit and the idea of a warrior-princess.

She'd spent time training and yet she could feel something in the air when and as she transformed. A briny odor, that of the Ocean in all her infinite beauty, one that was close.

She'd seen in her peripheral vision too a girl with aquamarine hair, one whom she could never quite shake. She was, she would not hesitate to admit, more than slightly worried about this and her not entirely hidden stalker.

It was a thing of relief to see ol' Bun-head and she made a point of getting to know her better, because there was familarity, not a stranger with an arch manner whose eyes were the same color as her hair and gazed at her closely with a searching gaze she did not like.

\-------

The next day, she'd learned of a strange outbreak of stranger behavior. A psychic had set up shop not far from her school and people who'd gone to get readings from her were reacting with patterns of cruel behavior. Several people were in jail for commuting assaults of ferocious violence, restrained and needing at times muzzles to stop foaming raving screaming from them. They spoke of a woman with dark hair and a tarot, in those ramblings. It was when one of her teammates went there and then attacked another one, quite literally gnawing at the other person's shoulder (and Haruka had not seen a gleaming light on her head nor understood that she reached out and touched that person on the shoulder, her other hand drawn into a fist and then that person's primal and even monstrous elements had faded and she felt the metallic taste of blood in her mouth and spat it out, screaming in horror. The other person had been surprised and felt some relief at the thought that her teammate really wasn't the near-feral thing that had attacked her, but they were worried even more after that).

That was the last straw, and so Tenoh Haruka had gone out without telling Luna or others. To her further consternation, she saw bun-head's friend Naru Osaka going to the clairvoyant. She drew her little mace, as she called it (when she learned what the henshins of the Outer Senshi were called she just called it a mace. Like Hel she'd use the term Lip Rod for anything!) and in a flash of light to an outward observer, Tenoh Haruka was gone. Sailor Uranus crouched, eyes narrow. Her mortal self could see differently than she could, and she had sight that was beyond that of a Senshi.

All Senshi had magickal vision, but only the Royal Family, including the cousin of the Princess from Venus with her dour and brooding self, had the power to truly _see_ not just bad energy, but to detect the threads that made it so. She could sense a very powerful thread in this place, and snuck in, her hand on the hilt of her blade.

She did not know that Balm, the Youma in this place, had sensed a powerful being of Light that had a nature she could not quite place, as if there were two or three beings in unity and yet division, and had reacted accordingly. She had placed the devil card in the hand of Osaka Naru and spoken a word of power to try to drain her and feed when there was a _blur_ and then a hand slammed her against the wall with a terrible booming sound.

"What did you do to her?"

"No speech of love and justice?"

All that got her was that same _speed_ and she yelled in genuine pain at the impact of her back against the wood, splinters erupting outward.

"Same thing I did to the rest. Harvesting soul-energy with the Devil-Tarot."

The creature's smile was unnatural, akin to that of the beast Morga.

"I don't know what I expected but it was not this," cackled the creature, and then her hair lanced out as she laughed and her smile became one of long fangs and her jaw opened in a massive gape, fangs extending out from it. Uranus moved back with a blinding speed, flipping herself over effortlessly.

The Youma snarled, the sound rippling outward as she felt a second pulse of that terrible Light around, and then the blade came out and she shrieked in pain as her hair was sliced.

Uranus grinned, with a terrible smile, and the Youma's eyes widened when a being with aquamarine hair stepped into the room near the epileptic-convulsing Naru Osaka, and knelt beside her, taking out a mirror and moving it with soft words. The epilepsy stopped and then Uranus drew upon a power that gleamed with a deadly light, both brighter and stranger than what it had been. The wind convulsed with its Mistress calling upon its seven faces and the Youma could not breathe. For a different reason, neither could Sailor Neptune, who devoured the gaze of the body of Sailor Uranus as she saw her moving with speed and power, the shout of _World Shaking_ was followed by the visceral sensation of a golden sphere that slammed into the Youma, the creature hissing a word of gutural Chaos-speech as it crumbled into dust.

She turned to the Devil-card, only to find it held in the hands of....she froze.

The woman she saw was the most beautiful woman she'd ever seen, and the sight of those quiet and pensive Aquamarine eyes was as if she'd found the second half of her soul. Tenoh Haruka had tried two boyfriends and the key word there was 'tried' for she'd never been able to truly connect nor wanted to connect. That attempt with Chiba Mamoru had turned her off men forever, and she vowed as a bi woman she'd only want to be with women. And yet the gaze of this beautiful goddess and her aura of oceanic depth and sheer splendor and deadly force was enough that she vowed nothing with _women,_ only with this beauty, for whom every beat of her heart would be from that moment forward.

Both stared in silence until the card sparked, its unhallowed energies reacting dangerously to the presence of two Senshi.

Neptune sighed, "Ara, we'll have to deal with this, then,"

She tossed it into the air and Uranus raised the Space Sword, the Mirror humming at the sight of its partner. A single beam of light disintegrated the card and rays of life-force went out, returning to the presence of those drained, whose raving madness stilled.

They stared at each other longer, both trying to talk and their usual elegance and distance breaking down in a scenario that an outsider knowing of the later beauty and fame and grace of Tenoh Haruka, famous racer, and Kaiou Michiru, famous violinist renowned worldwide would have sought to capture purely for the sight. The moment only faded when Uranus turned to leave, and then said to Neptune with a soft smile: "Will I see you again?"

Neptune let herself smile then, genuinely. "Of course!"

Naru Osaka found herself waking up then, briefly, seeing a being with aquamarine hair and smelling a strong odor of ocean here, in downtown Tokyo that should not have been there. She moved fast and seemed to leap tall buildings in a single bound. And there was another with white hair she saw for only a second before there was a blur.

And then.....a young woman with dirty blonde hair, clad in a male students' uniform.

"You all right?" Her question was silent, "I heard sounds here." Her eyes widened a bit. Hair like this, close-cropped, and yet she used the phrasing "Atashi" to refer to herself. OK, well, that wasn't so bad then. There were plenty of odd women in Japan.

Naru blinked. "I don't know what you heard but I went here to have my fortune told."

She looked around. "Went to have my fortune told and all I got was a headache."

The older girl laughed. Even when Naru couldn't resist wondering "Why did I smell the ocean?" she missed that the other girl had stiffened.

She helped her to get nearer her house and then seemed to move with a speed that made Naru blink and rub her eyes. Then she fell face forward when the excited squealing of a friend was followed with a near-tackle.

She looked at her with a more than faint amusement. "Hi, Usagi!"

\--------

The next day Tenoh Haruka went to school with a cloud of anger hanging over her after another bruising argument with her father. Today he wouldn't let her wear her pants and her male uniform, today she had to go in a girl's uniform or he'd ground her again. So she was unhappy to wear the skirt against her will, feeling uncomfortable to say the least. She was still moreso and visibly nervous when she saw aquamarine hair in her peripheral vision and tried to tap into just a bit of what she could do in that _other_ face. It did not take her long to get to school even when there was a line of literal fire following her motions, and somehow while part of her skirt was singed (and indeed after that her father, worried, would never force her to do this again) her shoes were not, and only a bit of her jacket, on the sleeves and the back.

She looked around, worriedly. No aquamarine, and let herself sigh in relief.

School was its usual boring self until she heard the announcement at the end of the day that racing and other track and field sports would resume in two days. She couldn't resist a smile of grim amusement to see how racing would be _this_ time.

She was so content with the world with this that she'd even half-assedly snarled at Chiba when he was messing with Bun-Head again and only lost her composure when that aquamarine was following her, and following her _to her house._

She didn't see the aquamarine until after she was inside, and she shuddered. She had a stalker, a woman was stalking her. Laws in Japan were not very good with this for men and women, to have a woman stalking her and to try to report that.....

She couldn't resist a bitter snort.


	4. Love Letters and Radios:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jadeite, concerned by the defeat of his first two Youma and the rise of two new Senshi, orders the Youma Jaura to begin the first phase of a pair of plans to draw out the Senshi to destroy them. 
> 
> Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune encounter each other again.

_Midnight Zero Offices:_

The Shitennou Jadeite had once been one of the greatest warriors of the Silver Millennium, loyal beyond all doubt to his lord, Crown Prince Endymion, heir to King Tellus. Time and fate had changed things. Beryl had come to him empowered by the dark arts of Metallia, a being she described as a 'child of the World-Destroyers, entrapped in the burning heart of the Sun itself.' She had shown power to match the arts of the Senshi, dark energy that could take men and rework their flesh into monsters. Then she had loved Endymion. Now, remembering the brooding figure on the throne in the Arctic, he wasn't sure if that was still true. 

His Prince had become betrothed to the Princess of the Moon, though he barely remembered it, and he was uncertain if it was love, if it was the Princess wanting something of her own and not beholden to the Queen who had declared her the Cauldron-Born (a term that had attracted awe and worry and fear and given Beryl her first inroads, declaring humanity should fight monsters with monsters), or if there had been other factors. All he remembered was a woman clad in a military-style uniform, one with a breastplate of engraved adamantium, hair moved from pigtails to a single long braid, and her holding the dying figure of Endymion with her hand likewise on that of another. The flash was there, only vaguely, and it was a thing he brooded upon in the silence.

He'd purchased this studio as the first means of his assaults on his enemies, to wield the power of technology wedded to ancient magick. Morga had failed, so had Balm. Now, here, there was Jaura, whose red-headed form sat at a radio studio in a humanoid shape. Jaura, Iguara, and Ramua. One to draw people by love, the other two to work with her to destroy these new Senshi.

It was not fair, he smiled coldly, to set the Senshi as a single woman against three Youma. But if it would slay his enemies, fairness was not a requirement.

Jadeite did not brood further when he gave the directions to his Youma, and then retreated into the shadows that thanks to Queen Beryl were blessing and not a thing of barely-remembered fear, as when the old sorceress in her first incarnation had come to him with eyes that glowed like stars and spoken of secret artes that had dealt great pain and transformations. He would see these Senshi, for only a fool waged war in ignorance.

\--------

_Two Days Later:_

A new case of sickness had begun to stalk the streets of Tokyo. Before it had been jewels, and the creature Morga had been a part of it. Then the Hellish Tarot-game of the monster balm. Now it seemed that a radio show talking of all things about love had brought a strange sickness upon those who called in. The middle school teacher Sakurada Haruna had fallen ill among them and so had teachers and students in Tenoh Haruka's high school. She had seen her friend bun-head worrying about this, and wondering, too, if it truly was connected to the radio station.

Two days had lapsed, and in that span of time where those who had been sick were there, the sickness seemed to stalk to those who were treating them and to spread like an illness. No sudden outbursts of murderous violence, in this case it was akin to an anemia without the true physiological effects. Tenoh Haruka had continued her training, grasping both elements of her Talisman, as it was called. It reminded her of the old story of Susanoo and the dragon, and the sword taken from the tail of the slain eight-headed serpent. It was a thing of wonders, able to project energy and seemingly to cut atoms (though not entirely so, for to do so was to produce truly nuclear effects). She could command that power she called _World Shaking,_ she could project beams, the _Space Sword Blaster...._ and she was deciphering the very power of the Seven Winds themselves as _Space Turbulence._

And she was fast. She could not truthfully use her speed at its maximum levels outside her Senshi transformation or she quite literally burned her clothes clean off with the friction of her motions, and even in her Senshi transformation she left streaks of fire from the initial takeoff. She could circumnavigate the globe in ten minutes without ill effects from G-forces or strain on her bones. She suspected she was bulletproof, though she had no proof of this, and she was _strong._ Even absent her Senshi transformation she could bend steel and lift a car single-handedly, with it....she didn't know her upper limits and was uncertain if she truly wished to.

Training was delightful. Tenoh Haruka was in her own view, full of self-hatred and the long standing despising of herself and of others of herself, a being of contradictions. A thing neither truly woman nor man who fit in nowhere and desperately ached for an end to that loneliness. Her thoughts were fearful and binary black and white views of good and evil and with a streak of darkness within that she could not truly deny but wished to. Sailor Uranus was an ancient being only partially human, hair white, not blonde, and in her visions there was wisdom, leavened by bemusement. She had wondered if there was a strangeness to her incarnation, for what she had been was destroyed by Metallia itself back in the day and yet somehow, in some way, she had become reborn.

Tenoh Haruka never understood this nor the speech that echoed behind her mind, nor the ways in which she was either one or two or more than either.

All she knew was that it shaped her interactions. She was even more curt to her father, though he had begun to change, slightly, aware of the transformations within his daughter only insofar as he saw her stronger and faster than anything truly human should be, and decided whatever lay here meant that arguing against who she was was futile.

It was Tenoh Haruka who greeted bunhead, and listened to her worries. It was then that Luna took that moment to appear and audibly spoke in front of them both and instead of jumping with fright, as she might have expected from Bun-head, the girl had stared in wonder and almost in a trance at the glowing symbol on Luna's head. Luna's words were not ones either fully remembered, save the last bit. "Come on, we need to go to that radio station. There is a darkness there."

Tenoh Haruka had greeted her, but it was after a blinding flash of light that Sailor Uranus took Tsukino Usagi in her arms and flew her to the station, not questioning that her body did not have major damage from the sheer speed and force of the flight,nor that she was perfectly calm when set down. Uranus could see, in the station. There was a darkness there, a strange darkness. It oozed malice in a tangible sense, and it seemed to have a conscious will behind it.

Her own body seemed to glow with a radiant light, not the golden aura of Uranus, as Luna noted with wide-eyed shock, but a brilliant silver hue. The wide-eyed bemusement became narrow-focused suspicion, and then incomprehension. Tsukino gazed in awe, following Uranus into the darkness that seemed to brood and grow and echo with malicious snarls and laughter. Where Uranus walked there was a silver light that offered healing and joy and comfort, and she was drawn to that light. When she arrived at the station's broadcasting room she heard not one but three voices laughing, and they both froze.

A woman in green with red hair gave them a sarcastic clap.

"Fools! You have fallen into the trap of Lord Jadeite, master of the Dark Kingdom's armies!"

Uranus drew her blade from its scabbard, a golden gleam echoing from the blade with a resonant nature like a hammer striking a gong.

"This is Japan, not the Dark Kingdom. And it will never be the Dark Kingdom."

The Youma laughed, no longer human, but a monstrous thing with long pointed ears and claws and a giggling shrieking tone to her laughter. Two other creatures stepped out.

One was a reptilian creature that hissed with long fangs extending from a double-jointed jaw, the other held a staff and for a moment a strange familiarity hit as that one raised it and spoke with an arch voice: "I am the master of time! It alone bends to my will!"

Then there was a briny odor of the deep that intruded, and the Youma turned with a sudden suspicion and a voice spoke with a low and menacing tone.

"There is one who is entrusted with the Gate of Time. You, abomination, are not her and you will never be her!"

The creature with the staff turned to her and laughed, Ramua feeling the power at work within it.

"You are not going to stop us...." she stared in confusion. "I don't recognize you."

"I am Sailor Neptune, soldier of elegance!"

The creature hissed: "I don't care if you're Susanoo and his lightning bolt. You will not stand in our way."

As the two Senshi called upon their power, Tsukino Usagi found herself staring in wondrous awe at a broach that appeared in front of her. Luna looked with curiosity, and said "Take it," in a voice that wasn't fully her own.

The Youma saw this and in a sudden motion Ramua brought her staff down and a bubble of slowing time reached out, as Tsukino Usagi's hand closed on the broach and then a second kind of silver light filled the room and blazed with a hallowed element that brought shrieks from the darkness and revealed a man clad in armor with blonde hair and piercing green eyes.

_Moon Crystal Power Make-up!_

In a blinding flash of light, Tsukino Usagi had vanished and Sailor Moon took her place. 

_I am the pretty-suited Sailor Soldier of Love and Justice! In the name of the moon I shall punish you!_

Uranus and Neptune both raised eyebrows, Neptune's eyebrow turning to wide-eyed shock, Uranus only shrugging. Well, if the opportunity fit.....

She suddenly moved in a blurring speed that brought an explosive force that shattered windows around the studio, the glass ricocheting off the Senshi and cutting the Youma, which wailed. With her speed she was able to just barely evade the initial effects of the time-slowdown, her blade going straight for the heart of Iguara, who lashed out with her tail for Uranus's neck. Yet Uranus was fast, faster than lightning bolts and the Sun itself, and the tail missed even as a shining spot was visible.

Time slowed to a crawl around Neptune, whose summoning of her attack was slowed to an infinitely slow duration, though Sailor Moon, newly transformed, raised her own Henshin and called from it a kind of power she wielded on instinct, not yet understanding (and it would take her a long time to come closer to that understanding in all truth) that collided with the time-slowdown.

In a shriek of agony that faded to a whimper, Iguara crumbled to ashes, and Uranus gave a feral grin as she turned to Jaura. Jaura fired bolts of dark energy that Uranus gracefully danced around and beneath, her blade deflecting others that became whisps of smoke.

Time-slowing and the light of the Moon collided and Sailor Moon could not resist a confident smile of the kind Tsukino Usagi would not show as yet when her light began to speed time back up and the words frozen in mid-speech were brought to a conclusion:

_Deep Submerge!_

The oceanic odor intensified and there was a greenish light that shone with an overpowering brilliance, the salty element to the air causing smoke on the flesh of the Youma, which all shrieked in anger and became drawn closer to a feral kind of madness, hissing like snakes. A bluish sphere of surpassing destructive force collided with the second of the Youma. 

Only her calling upon the great power of Time permitted Rauma to withstand the blow, though her body smoked and bled heavily, and she fired a bolt of concentrated time-power straight for Neptune, who ducked beneath it barely, the blast shearing off a lock of her hair that aged to grey, then white, then dust. She growled with genuine anger then, and fired a second _Deep Submerge_ that killed the Youma, her anger evident as she caressed her wounded hair.

Now it was Jaura who found herself in a corner next to Uranus, who raised her blade only to smile as Jadeite revealed himself with his own blade drawn, hellish runes gleaming.

"Uranus!" Both Moon and Neptune shouted it at the same time and as she turned to face the distraction things shifted yet again. 

A rose landed in front of Jadeite, who stared in initial confusion and then dawning familiarity and horror and regret and guilt....and then his eyes blazed and he snarled in a guttural voice no longer his own.

"That's not fair of you," spoke a deep rich voice.

"Taking a sword to stab a woman in the back."

A man strode in, clad in a Senshi armor of his own that resembled nothing so much as a tuxedo with a cape and a mask that disguised his eyes and the upper part of his face, his eyes glowing with a mystic potency. He had in his right hand what seemed to be a cane until he drew a blade of his own marked with hallowed ancient runes of Old Terra, runes that caused the blade to glow as if it were a torch.

"You can't be here!"

"I am," said Tuxedo Mask. 

_Tuxedo La Smoking Bomber!_

The rose exploded in a brilliant flash of mystic light and the Youma disintegrated and Jadeite stared in wonder and horror, the guttural snarl fading as he stared at the Prince, whose body seemed to exude a golden light that lay hidden, and only partially present, and at the being who believed herself Uranus, whose light was that of a surpassing hallowed silver next to which that of Moon was but, ironically, the Moon to its Sun. 

"What the fuck?" His ears rang with the aftermath of the explosion and then he ran and sprang out of the building. The Queen would need to know this.

\--------

"Who are you?"

It was not Moon who asked this question (and as the future showed there was much irony in this) but a wary Uranus, her blade now sheathed.

"Call me Tuxedo Mask," he said calmly, his smile welcoming. 

_'Call me Endymion,' he said calmly, as he reached for her hand. 'I know your preference, Princess. I do not expect love from you, but I think we have a common goal.' His lips were on her hands and the look in his eyes meant that she did not pull back but stared with curiosity and wariness._

Both blinked, the momentary flash as disorienting as his magic. 

"Right, well..." Uranus said awkwardly, looking around at the devastation, sirens beginning to sound. "I think we need to get the Hell out of here."

The devastated building was left there, and it was in the wake of the fleeing Jadeite and his blast of casual magic that destroyed a police car and sent it flipping into the air that the people of Tokyo first caught a glimpse of Sailor Uranus, the last of them to leave due to her speed, who stared at the police officer sent flying from his car and caught him, as he stared and asked a question that came to mind from a film he'd once seen "Who's got you, again?"

Recognizing the allusion Uranus had smiled and asked him "Do you believe a woman can fly?"

Headlines the next day broke the news of the existence of a confirmed second Senshi, a Sailor Guardian with a blade, whose powers were unknown. Sailor V was already known at this time, and the idea thus set in at this point that all Senshi had and wielded blades, a concept that would only be dispelled by further growing experience of the Senshi, of who they were, and what they were.


	5. The Queen's Mercy:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jadeite goes to D-Point and is given a simple order: Kill the Senshi by any means necessary, with personal command. 
> 
> As he goes to fulfill this order, Ami Mizuno encounters a talking cat and the strangest sight she's ever seen in her life.

_D-Point, Arctic Circle:_

Beryl stared at Jadeite on her throne, her orb silent. 

"You did not have to come here to inform me, general. I see much on that Orb. Your Youma are failures. You too, you are a failure. You have been sent to draw energy and these.... _children..._ dispel your works and make of them a mockery. You were a general, once, a commander of great armies. Now children have defeated you. You will draw all your Youma in a single strike, no more energy gathering. Kill them all, bring me their skulls. Then, _General_ Jadeite I will overlook your failures once we bring Metallia to this world."

She looked at the Orb.

"Sailor V has destroyed our European operations, Sailor Neptune destroyed our American ones. Neptune more easily than Venus, but that is no great surprise. The Outer Senshi were meant to destroy armies on their own and their native, lowest level of power is greater than the highest of the Inner Senshi."

She steepled her hands.

"We have lost two-thirds of our operations, General. To two children. So do not see this as a punishment, sending you to do this job properly."

Then her smile became cold.

"Instead, see _this_ as the punishment," and then a bolt of Dark Energy lanced out from her and ripped into Jadeite's body as his skeleton glowed beneath his flesh and a howl of agony erupted from his mouth like a strained rasping shriek that no natural voice should have given sound to. It lasted less than a minute in terms of the blast but the physical effects endured for a half-day before which point Beryl teleported him back to his office, where he reclined on his seat, weakened and burned beneath his robes and with markings on his flesh where the damage had corrupted his veins.

He shuddered.

It took him two days to recover from the torment unleashed, time in which Moon and Uranus trained together, though Neptune remained standoffish.

The impact of the first battle to draw the eyes of the authorities had been sharp, the proof of monsters leavened only by the hope of one proven Senshi and the hope that there were others.

If Uranus was a powerful juggernaut who wielded the Seven Winds, her blade able to destroy Corruption by its very nature, Moon seemed to be a mighty healer and a being whose presence instilled greater strength in those around her, while banishing evil that came too close. She had only seen Neptune on the battlefield, where the oceanic odor around her and the bright green light that was there were unlike anything else they had encountered. And then there was Tuxedo Mask, whom they'd seen for the first time there.

Only Uranus and Moon trained at first, and it was an act of impulse on Uranus's part that led her to detransform and to discover to her surprise that Bun-Head, a year younger than she was, was the Senshi of the Moon, commanding a power that worked wholly differently to her. She'd asked her at one point if she remembered a Princess on the Moon, on the second day of that training, after deciphering that _Moon Healing Escalation_ targeting something that wasn't a Youma was no less destructive than her own power, just focused in a different way, and flushed with the enjoyment that Moon, too, could fly. 

Moon had looked at her strangely for a moment, lips tight, then shook her head no.

"I don't," she said. "I remember a woman with long white hair and shining eyes, and I remember a name. Endymion. Right now I don't remember anything else."

That had been a day ago.

Now, she was looking carefully at a genius student, with some of the highest marks in the school, who had seen Tenoh's cat.

She raised an eyebrow, at first, then her eyes widened moreso when Mizuno was staring at the cat and actually slapped herself for a moment.

She turned to Tsukino "That cat talks," saying it in a surprisingly confident and nonchalant voice given the innate absurdity of the statement.

Tsukino nodded. "Let's talk....a bit away."

And in the library, she listened to Mizuno telling her of the cat speaking to her, after she'd been overheard speaking of a dream where she'd commanded a fog, and memories of a visor and of other things beside. Mizuno was withdrawn and secretive, her intelligence not helping these matters as it made it hard for her to relate to others.

Yet in that talk something of her ice defrosted, and a sense of loneliness met a powerful balm as the two women talked and shared and spoke of secret things.

\------

Jadeite had recovered, now, and he had responded to Beryl's ultimatum with a simple warning. He had hijacked the Tokyo airwaves in a small demonstration of the magickal powers of the Dark Kingdom, and spoken in his full uniform. He challenged Sailors Moon, Uranus, and Neptune to a duel at the airport. Tsukino and Mizuno had been talking for a moment when that broadcast hit and she'd seen Tsukino go pale, and then suddenly run out before there was a brilliant flash of light.

Then there was another, hanging in front of her, and the cat appeared as if by magick (no as if, then, in all truth as she came to understand). The object was there in front of her and she heard the cat's words quietly and yet in a booming set of thunderclaps, and then her hand closed around the Henshin and in a flash of light and _Mercury Crystal Power Make-up!_ Sailor Mercury looked at the Mau, dropped down her visor, and flew by instinct to join the rest of the Senshi.

\--------

"This is a trap," was the first thing Uranus heard. It was not from Moon, who'd just arrived slightly out of breath, but from the almost detached voice of Neptune, who looked at her right gauntlet with an almost bored look. "You know that it is."

Uranus nodded. "Yes, I do. But......I think it's worth springing."

Neptune couldn't resist rolling her eyes slightly. "You always were a straightforward fighter," as Uranus gave her a sharp look.

"I also tend to kill everything I go for, too."

Neptune rolled her eyes again. "Yes, of course you do."

Moon spoke then, timidly. "I think she's right."

Neptune turned to her, the smaller girl seeming to shrink to Chibi size with a blue set of lines on her face and sweatdrops as Neptune seemed to be a titan by comparison, arms crossed across her chest Yet Moon continued, bravely. "He said he'd destroy Tokyo, and if he's lying, that's one thing. But if he isn't and we don't show up, then all that blood is on our hands and I don't want it to be."

Neptune sighed, gritting her teeth. "Very well." 

Just as they prepared to move, another pair of figures of light arrived. One was Tuxedo Mask, who was greeted with a warmer smile by Moon that he returned, tipping his hat in salute, and the other was a woman with short blue hair and a visor, and a strong sense of dampness that brought heaviness to the air at one level or a sense of deep ice that chilled the air likewise.

"Who are you?" It was Moon who asked the question with curiosity.

"Sailor Mercury, Sailor of Intelligence."

The other Senshi nodded, memories unlocking for Uranus and present from the beginning with Neptune, who had a deeper sigh of relief.

"Well, if we're going...."

As one the Senshi and Tuxedo Mask flew together to the airport.

At its outskirts, they saw an area where the shadows were thicker and seemed to echo with an endless Hunger, and there Youma. One was a blue being clad in a tattered white dress, its bald head seeing it snarl with a trifurcated jaw. One a being of reddish skin and a truly devilish appearance who clacked his long claws together with amusement in a cruel sense, his smile very wide indeed. One a feral-seeming thing in a crouch with tattered clothes and eyes that glowed a burning and terrible reddish hue. And one like a doll, clad in dark blue and crimson clothes.

Beside them all was Jadeite, his blade drawn.

"Well, then," he said as he raised his blade in salute, the runes giving it a brilliant crimson hue.

"Moon, Neptune, Uranus. I know you. I don't know you," he turned to Mercury. Then his voice became a guttural rasp. "Prince Endymion," the low snarl one that echoed with menace, as Tuxedo Mask drew his own blade that shone with a hallowed light that sparked like fire.

His blade was raised to Uranus.

"Shall we duel, swordmaster to swordmistress?"

Uranus's grin was somewhat cold and wrathful.

"If you think you can keep up."

"Oh I have no fears there, rest assured."

And with that he springboarded into the air to meet her as she moved in turn, empowered by the Seven Winds.

The Senshi began to move, Mercury tapping by instinct into her first attack, a dense fogbank rising, one that was transparent to the Senshi and Tuxedo Mask, but impenetrable to the Youma. They were drawn first to the light of Tuxedo Mask's blade and then Garouben roared as he raised an axe of blood and terror and charged him. Fire and fury rippled outward, axe colliding against blade, as Kigaan's claws lanced out for Neptune, who casually swept underneath them and then a violin appeared on her shoulder.

He smiled. "What are you gonna play, little girl? _The Devil Went Down to Georgia_?"

Neptune's face turned to a cold and somewhat sinister smile. _Submarine Violin Tide._ Then the bow began to work and there was a sudden _sound_ that echoed outward, the sound becoming a vast tsunami that rose over Kigaan.

His last sound was a terrified squeaked "Oh."

As Tuxedo Mask and Garouben dueled, Moon's light joined with Neptune's harmonic power and the flowing ocean-magic and Mercury's mist, Dirella looking at the power that was combining against her and shattered her webbing with a whimpered "Oh shit," and then disintegrating under that force.

Above them a blade of hellish light dueled with the blade of the Seven Winds, Uranus by far the faster, Jadeite the trained swordsman. This and his telekinesis combined to just barely give him an edge enough to endure with a growing set of minor cuts, while Uranus remained untouched his blade too slow to strike her even with the fullness of his skill and his somewhat greater reach. The duel reached a speed that Uranus could easily sustain but strained the muscles of Jadeite, who found himself relying on telekinesis to draw the strength of her blade, a focus that could not sustain the fullness of the duel as the various wounds began to tell on him and he began to dip to the ground.

The sight of his Prince moving his blade with superb skill and finally severing the haft of Gebourdan's axe and then the Youma staring in shock as the glowing blade pierced him and the combined weight of the Senshi slammed into him and broke his being to the dust from whence he came left him aware then, dully, that he'd failed. All his Youma spent, the Senshi victorious.

The sight of his prince wielding the blade activated a set of buried memories, flashes of the old Endymion with his cryptic smiles and his carefully guarded sentences. Furtive meetings with the Moon Princess, and a growing tie and bond to her Senshi and her shadow. Endymion together with the Princess and the Senshi in the final battle, all of them together on the battlefield, the Princess displaying a deft skill for bladework and shielding them and then blades did their work. The memories brought tears to his eyes and the malice fell from him, and Uranus paused.

"Jadeite?" He heard a voice that sounded familiar and impossible from her lips, and his eyes widened,

"Please," he begged her. "Now, while I'm still me."

She mouthed 'I'm sorry' and then her blade shone with a hallowed light that was not the golden of the old Space Sword but something else and as the blade struck true, he felt the taint of Chaos on his soul burning away and he saw a light within Uranus that left him knowing wonder.

Tuxedo Mask found himself holding a stone and standing in silence for a long time, gazing in awe and wonder, as the Senshi took stock.

There were scorched marks and craters where the Youma had fallen, Uranus's winds had shattered glass and left devastation on parts of the airport. But they were alive, gloriously, exhilaratingly alive.

For a single moment in time, however, the darkness pulsed anew and then there was a woman in a dark blue blue dress with hair of the hue of blood and eyes that glowed with an eldritch malice.

 ** _You,_** she hissed in a snarl of utter malice that lanced into the heart of all that is.

Her gaze was drawn to the Senshi with the blade that glowed with the hallowed silver light.

_**You slew my General, and all of those Youma.** _

Queen Beryl looked at them with distaste.

**_Outer System barbarian!_ **

Then she took the organic-seeming staff topped topped with wicked-seeming claws, around which reality _twisted._ She slammed the staff into the ground which shattered with the force of the blow in a gesture registered across the world on a Richter scale.

Uranus quietly stood, then, and for a moment it seemed that another being arose near her or around her. The very air around her seemed different, her hair was much longer, and a brilliant shining glow appeared that led to Beryl gasping in awe.

**_The......Princess? Impossible. A clever trick. You conjured her._ **

The darkness she summoned ripped through the ground in a set of spears of shadow and it slammed against the dome of silver light and became dense clouds of choking darkness, as the gleaming figure in silver crossed her arms in front of her chest. 

_Begone, Fell Spirit._

Her arms uncrossed and she raised her right hand and a lance of silver energy struck out, the staff deflecting it even as it made Beryl howl with anger. 

**_We shall meet again, Serenity. Whatever face you hide behind....oh, yes. We'll meet again._ **

She snarled and vanished in a flash of Nothingness-energy. 

\---------

_D-Point:_

Beryl clutched her arms, where wounds still hissed with pain that would take a time to dissipate. Her eyes turned to Nephrite. 

_**The Princess lives,**_ it was not her voice that spoke then, but something _else_ that gave her eyes a glowing hue and her veins a gleaming magma-like trajectory around her body. Nephrite knelt, for that voice had summoned him.

**_Take your soul-shadow, Nephrite. Find the Princess. Bring me her skull._ **

\---------

_Hikawa Shrine:_

Ever since she was younger, Hino Rei had seen visions, sometimes in her dreams. Most often, as now, within the flames. Within the flames she saw a man with dark reddish-brown hair who called lighting from heaven, and the appearance of beings of silver, of oceanic majesty, of frost and mist, and of herself. Of fire and war and the knowledge of the hidden things. She saw a vicious shadowy thing that would seek to assail her shrine, and the means by which she repelled it. 

Destiny would come to her in the form of a tall woman and a shorter one, both blondes, both tied to a set of tangles of destiny.

Destiny would come and she could see the long period of loneliness falling.

Before she had shunned the visions. Now.......she embraced them.


	6. The Shadow Soul and the Violinist:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nephrite begins his search for the Princess by seeking individuals with powerful mystic auras. His first quest ends up with him biting off a great deal more than he can chew.

_Crown Arcade:_

Two days had lapsed since the major battle with Jadeite and nothing had happened since. None of the Senshi believed the enemy was truly destroyed. The presence of the woman in the blue dress with red hair (whom Luna had identified as Beryl, ruler of the so-called Dark Kingdom) had confirmed that. She was powerful, she had fought them all on equal terms or more precisely, she had toyed with them and they had barely escaped an avoidable catastrophe because she was not willing to push it to a full confrontation. Mizuno was an indispensable part of their team. Insofar as their attacks were weak, hers were weakest (and yet her sphere of protection was immensely strong, no attack of the others could dislodge it). Her mists were great shields, warding the Senshi from sight and seeming to enhance their perceptions, permitting them a destructive power far beyond what they already had. 

She had already begun to help them hone themselves from a team into something approaching a unit that worked best together, discovering by sheer accident that they could teleport if they wished, and that it only required holding their henshin, saying _Sailor Teleport Power_ and thinking of their destinations. In truth if Tenoh Haruka had realized such depths hid behind so quiet and bookish an exterior she would have changed much else about her life. That training took only a few hours each day and yet they were hours that delivered results of years, even decades. It was after the second such session that she was watching Osaka Naru, Mizuno, and Tsukino playing a game with a warm smile on her face in the arcade.

None of them had seen the mysterious Sailor Neptune, though she had seen signs of the aquamarine-haired stalker, and had taken to wearing a hoodie to disguise herself and to try to prevent being visible to the aforementioned person. She had even seen this one step into the arcade and follow them before at one point turning to leave. She shuddered. She had no idea who that person was, but she did not want to know, either.

_Just Outside the Arcade:_

Kaioh Michiru glared at Chiba Mamoru. 

"I know you've been stalking her."

Michiru's face was calm and even cold, but not colder than her tone of voice as the air took on an undeniably oceanic air.

"And who precisely is her?"

"You know who. Tenoh. You've been stalking her for the last year and a half."

"How can you tell?"

"How many people with aquamarine hair and a sea-salt flavor to the air around them are there in Japan? Can't be more than six dozen."

Michiru's right eye twitched slightly, and her left hand clenched into a fist, the only outward concessions of her anger at that frivolous assertion.

Yet her voice was a glacial calm when she replied: "If you knew why I stalked her..."

Chiba's voice took on a colder edge. "I dated her, you know. Are you so certain she's like you?"

"And that means what?" The cold had taken on an edge of menace and Chiba pulled at his collar. "Someone who likes girls, that's what I meant. Nothing else."

Michiru let it slide. "I.....I am. Why I am, I can't quite explain (a mirror in her purse seemed to hum and Chiba straightened up at the sound as she froze and turned pale for a second). And in any event, what precisely is it you do to give you those bags under your eyes? You live on your own not so far from the school, and it's not like your social life is....active." 

Mamoru gave an awkward laugh and pulled at his collar.

"I....concede the point."

The edge of ugly hostility that was boiling around both of them and pushing at the air receded then, as both took a breath.

Kaioh's pager beeped and she sighed.

"I have to go to the studio to practice."

With that phrase she turned, but not without a longing look at the arcade and the tall woman in the hoody, and she sighed in a deeper sense, redolent with buried emotions and old memories of a shining palace and a stern and icy soldier of great power and furious strength.

Chiba recognized the nature of that sigh and he started, turning, but Kaioh was gone.

He put his right pointer finger to his chin thoughtfully, then shrugged and decided to grit his teeth and risk an encounter with his ex and with bun-head.

\------

Tenoh Haruka had just trusted herself to let down her hoodie when she froze and facepalmed.

"If it's not one thing, it's another," she growled.

Tsukino turned with surprise and then her eyes widened at first very wide, then narrowed.

She turned to directly face Chiba as he walked toward them, hands in his pocket, feeling somewhat out of place.

"You," she growled. "Why are you here?"

"I......I wanted to apologize, Tsukino-chan."

She froze, and Tenoh turned then, actually surprised to hear those words.

"I have been treating you wrongly, the last couple of...years. I know the apology won't be worth much without the deeds, but I hope to show them."

Tenoh sniffed, rudely, and turned away before Chiba gulped, jaw firm, and then reached out to tap her on the shoulder.

When she whirled around with a superhuman speed his eyes widened. All of a sudden he knew precisely what secret lay behind her, for only one being in Japan was capable of such speeds.

"Yes?" Her voice was not the colder anger of Tsukino, but a wrathful volcanic fury that was aching for an outlet.

"I........I know that we did not part on good terms, Tenoh-san. But it has been six months now, and I want us to at least go back to speaking terms."

Tenoh's gaze could have turned a lesser man to stone and even with his secrets, the roses and the stone that was in a safe place in his home, Chiba Mamoru quailed from it then as he had in the beginning.

"As opposed to when you broke up with me and called me a filthy bull dyke in front of all of our classmates?"

He flushed, pulling at his collar again.

"Yes, I was wrong. Wrong to say that, and to let the anger cloud me."

She turned back to the game, saying nothing as the uncomfortable silence stretched, before pinching her nose and making a groaning rumble somewhere between sigh and snarl, and turning back to Mamoru.

"As you said to Tsukino-san, so with me. Show me by your actions you mean these words, and I might start thinking about forgiving you."

She turned back to him, and her gaze retained that harsh anger that made him feel very small.

"You of all people should know it's not that simple with me as to just like boys or girls. I understand anger, Chiba-san, but I do not understand taking it that far, or saying that kind of thing."

He nodded, unable to meet her gaze, though she did not see it.

"I admit to being in a bad place and letting it cloud my actions. That is not excuse for them, nor rationale."

Tenoh said nothing, but did not tell him to leave or turn to him with a literal glow seeming to build in her eyes and the very air around her howling like a gale in a terrible storm, so he considered that progress.

In such a condition, with the woman he'd come to call Usako and to fall deeply in love with, as destiny's gauntlets of steel and bone reached for them both, did things begin. In the future they would laugh to consider the beginning, and Usako would eventually dare to ask him about why and how things had worked with Tenoh only a couple of years later, when the Death Busters arose and Kaioh and Tenoh were together for a long time and happy together. For then, not wanting to fight or produce the kind of scenes that had brought both a breakup and an impossible to explain windstorm that had detonated a main hallway of the middle school they were in was enough.

Only Mizuno had dared to look at them and to see the body language, and she understood much that was hidden, but as would become her usual, she said nothing.

\---------

_Tenoh Music Studios Rehearsal Hall:_

Kaioh Michiru took some pleasure in rehearsing in a hall owned by _that_ family. She took greater pleasure in performing near a picture of her, a picture taken when she was younger and in a relationship with Chiba Mamoru that had begun when they were thirteen and ended in fire and fury only six months ago in a strange incident. She knew more about that than most, much more than was otherwise healthy. Part of her felt longings, not just hers but those of the being that was within her and within her eyes, and that being saw strange things and made strange claims. 

When Kaioh Michiru and the Neptune that she was declared that she was loyal only to Tenoh Haruka and not to the will of the Moon, she almost swore that the moon smiled at her and it did not smile kindly. It had cursed her with strange powers of destructive nature, and with a clear memory of the old Silver Millennium. Tens of thousands of years of loneliness, raised when her mother had fallen in duty fighting the Great Enemy and sealing away the fell queen Metallia, a corrupted Jotunness of a realm of World-Destruction that had made a devil's bargain with the Great Enemy. Long years and bitter ones, waging a seemingly endless battle, and then had come a Night Without Consequence, a ball held on Titan.

There she had seen the Princess, tall and domineering, white hair in a single braid looped around her shoulders (and even then the stories of the friction between Serenity the Cauldron-Born and Queen Serenity the God-Empress was well known). She had taken the princess's hand and the two had danced then, and they had shared a secret kiss and she had learned that Serenity's rumored love of the Earth Crown Prince was something different. A millennium later the next Night Without Consequence brought them back together, and she had learned much more, taken a couple of gifts and given them to keep contact, their lips had pressed together, and there was a moment where they had sealed everything....until darkness arose around the Earth and the seals had broken down and the old enemies had escaped.

She remembered Serenity, and she remembered the angles of her face. Queen Serenity was an ideal figure of feminine beauty, more Goddess woven into human form than a human being. Princess Serenity was an androgynous ideal, at home in beautiful dresses but preferring a crisp military uniforms with a beautifully mastered golden breastplate adorned with symbolism at multiple levels.

The moon had given, the moon had taken away, cursed be the name of the Moon. She did not serve the Moon. She wanted Tenoh Haruka, a person of contradictions, something that the girl who had everything could not buy. Someone whose wrath had somehow exploded the heart of a school in a windstorm. A being of fearful strengths and secret fears, someone that she could reforge in her own vision and in her own likeness, mold and remake, and make her into a woman she'd desired. She had stalked Tenoh Haruka, as Chiba had said, for a long time indeed.

She knew a great deal more about her than a normal person would, she had entire files collected.

And now here she was, taking Marine Cathedral in her hands, and weaving melodies beneath her gaze, permitting herself a smile.

The moon had taken away and it had given, it had given her dreams of a woman with white hair and a power over the wind, and of a love that would be something indisputably hers.

She felt _him_ when he entered, before the shadows darkened, her mirror taken from her purse and slipped into the pockets of her jacket in a single deft motion, beside her henshin. Yet she played her music still, taking things from a dream and one of the few Western stories she'd truly loved. She had composed one or two pieces in honor of that, using the pseudonym Erich Zann, for she felt like Zann. A violinist whose violin stood between the world and a Darkness of everlasting howls and furious malevolence and worse, a cruel indifference to life.

As the darkness grew and a man with brown hair stepped in, she felt the Darkness with him, something that was him and was not him, and sighed imperceptibly. Then, as the nature of that Darkness intensified, she permitted herself a single upturned curve of her lip and placed her violin carefully in its case, before turning to face the figure.

"May I help you, Mister...."

He gave her a short hand of applause.

"That was beautiful playing, for what it's worth. You can call me Ness."

She raised a single aquamarine eyebrow.

"I am seeking people of great.....strength. Those who have an....inner light that shines very strongly, and who have much to offer."

Her hand slid into her pocket and grasped her henshin, though he made no motions that betrayed his knowledge of it.

"Mr....Ness, I am certain I have no idea what you're speaking of."

Then the shadows laughed and grew into a great thing that partially resembled Mr. Ness and yet was a thing of multiple eyes and snarling sounds.

**_We know you have power, Miss Kaioh._ **

She drew her henshin then and spoke words of power and in a flash of light, it was not Kaioh Michiru who stood before them but Sailor Neptune, the Aqua Mirror in her hands as Nephrite froze. 

He looked at the Shadow Soul, as worried as he was.

"Go to the violinist, you said. Go to the famous person, you said. It would be easier to go after the budding celebrity than the loner delinquent or the little girl in the shrine, you said."

Sailor Neptune's power filled the room, the briny air bringing smoke and groans of agony as the hallowed salt collided against the essence of the Shadow-Soul.

"I don't know what you think you're playing at, servant of the Dark Kingdom and I do not care."

She raised her mirror, as Nephrite raised his hands and then fire was summoned from the ceiling and fell like streaks that collided against a sudden shield of aquatic nature that brought steam and mist into the room. The smoking elements of his Daemon led to it howling in unconstrained agony and he jerked likewise.

_Deep Submerge._

Two words spoken, in a crisp old Lunarian. Two words and then _power_ built with the dark colossal weight of the ocean, and a sphere hurled Nephrite through the wall, his daemon roaring in agony that was audible in Tokyo, and then both fled into shadows they conjured around themselves as Neptune sniffed, contemptuous. 

The enemy knew who she was. Or would know.

Dammit. That meant she would have to take the steps then to reveal herself to Haruka in a way that she had hoped to find another.

The mirror went back in the jacket of Kaioh Michiru, who let herself stride out of the damaged hall and took flight in the air, deciding that she would return to the apartment that she lived in alone, her family casting out the beautiful doll they'd made when she proudly declared herself a lesbian, and had refused to accept the script they had wanted for her. Tomorrow.....she would communicate with Haruka, and she would hope that Haruka would understand.

When she arrived at her apartment, she did not see a woman with long blonde hair and a red bow seeing her flight and her eyes narrowing, and then moving on, noting then that she had at last deciphered all of the known Senshi, as well as the potentials.

Aino Minako looked at the list, neither her nor the person whose name she focused on, in neatly written Kanji aware of what tomorrow would hold for them.

Kino Makoto, a potential Senshi. A tall delinquent who lived alone and was rumored to have a fantastic aptitude for cooking.

The perfect kind of person based on what the incident she'd quietly witnessed had shown her to go for next. Someone seemingly alone, and vulnerable, without awareness of what power lay within her and what had fixed her destiny.

Minako felt a blade materialize at her side and grasped the hilt with a calm smile.

She had destroyed the Dark Kingdom in Europe, Neptune, a quasi-ally at best, had done so in the Americas. Ne'er had the twain met, but now......

Aino Minako slipped into the shadows herself, humming _All Along the Watchtower._ As she strode toward her house where her family had returned to Japan after their tour of Europe, she let the last lines become actual song, in a partially Received Pronunciation accent: "Out in the distance, a wildcat did growl....two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl." 


	7. The Ocean and the Thunderbolt:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kino Makoto has a very strange day. 
> 
> Kaioh Michiru reveals a deep secret.

_Apartment of Kino Makoto:_

Kino Makoto was having the dream again, and it was not a good dream. Ever since her parents had died in that plane crash, she hated dreams of flying, especially when it was in a craft of metal, the artifice of engineering mastering the skies. Yet it was a dream of flying but not in a plane. Her _body_ flew like a bird, gravity tugging at it like a sullen lover. She could see like a bird and hear the wind, and the voice that was calling to her. Flight was a thing of fear to her, and yet she noticed as she flew that she did not fly like a bird any longer. She flew on wind that was hers to command, for it was the howl of the storm and she was the lightning. She was the thunder. 

Kino Makoto awoke, and sat up in her bed, scratching at her eyes.

Strange. She shook her head slightly, and went about another lonely day, taking some satisfaction in the wariness of those who feared her gaze, knowing what it was _to_ fear her gaze. It was a sad thing, and something of a commentary on Japan that she was more feared and despised for protecting one who truly needed someone to protect her than the people who'd attacked her in cold blood. Her days were long and they were lonely, and her only passions were the hidden feminine things she let herself do, not for others, but for herself. Reminders of when she'd had a family that loved her.

On her way to her house, she glimpsed something strange. A woman with long dark hair, wearing overalls and a light red shirt, walking along and humming a song. Behind her moved a tall man with dark brown hair and there were things _wrong_ with the shadows behind him.

Too, she saw going in the other direction a woman with aquamarine hair, wearing a schoolgirl outfit and a look of mixed determination and wariness on her face. Not certain which to follow, at first, Kino slunk into the shadows and waited, and then, as she looked more closely she steeled herself, and took steps, not noticing that her hand slid around an object that had materialized in her pants pocket, her face furrowed.

_Senshi Training Ground:_

She had always known where it was, the ground where the other Senshi trained. She felt their energies together and the overpowering sensation of the transformations led to her grasping her henshin at times, wishing to see it, to know what it was to be with the other girls like her. Yet it was more than being used to working in solitude that led her to hold back, to resist that desire. Now she had a very good reason to go. 

She felt the magic for a moment, the wind responding to its master, and she let herself still for a moment, closing her eyes, letting the wind caress her face softly. Her eyes closed, she hummed with a melody to match the beauty of her music, in tune with the sounds of the wind. She could feel the fog and mist of Mercury, a power so akin to her own and yet vitally different. She was not Water, she was Ocean, water with the hallowed cleansing focus of salt. Mercury was Water, she was Ice, she was fog, she was steam, And she was the rivers, too.

She felt the light of Moon, and knew that Moon's power was capable of great destruction but that it was her who strengthened the rest.

And there was the Seven Winds.

For a moment she remembered her old partner, haunted by the death of the one she loved, fearful that the Cauldron would bring her forth again. And the cruel satisfaction with which the demon of fire had briefly forced her soul to pause as they were sent to be reborn and clutched in hands of molten magma threaded with foul magickal decay a shining object.....and had crushed it. She had wept then, knowing Uranus's wish was granted. Yet.....

The Seven Winds lived, and their focus was a strange puzzle to resolve.

She stepped into the training field, then, and the magick cut off and she found herself facing the immortal warrior-women, the Senshi.

Behind the rest was the tall white-haired Uranus, her blade back in its scabbard, her motions rolling ones of impatience, the wind chafing at constraints. To her left was Mercury, her darker blue hair and quiet gaze there, her visor flipped up. In the center was Moon, warm gaze reflecting the nature of her power, a light to dispel darkness, and to draw a team in unity and in strength. And to their right, a man in a tuxedo-like outfit that only seemed to be what it was. She could see the metallic elements woven in, the cunning artifice of armor, and she knew that the cane was in truth a scabbard that concealed a blazing blade.

Their eyes were on her.

It was Uranus who spoke first: "Why are you here?"

"The Enemy," was her first phrases spoken to the woman she loved, though she did not quite know then that this was so. Uranus reminded her achingly of Haruka but her hair was a brilliant white and her forehead gleamed with a light that did not seem quite right on the face of a Senshi of the Seven Winds.

Uranus's eyes narrowed. "Explain."

"You know the incident at Tenoh Music Hall?"

Uranus responded with a single stiff nod. "That was me. They.....attacked me. I think they're looking for someone, now."

"You know who they are?" Uranus's questions were curt, her fingers twitching slightly.

"I do. They call themselves the Dark Kingdom, risen out of long millennia." 

"Why did they attack you?"

Kaioh Michiru did not smile, then, she simply removed her henshin and spoke her words of power and they saw the light that surrounded her and the slight tinge of the ocean near her presence became the moment of impact of a tsunami as it made landfall, reality seeming to deform beneath her presence.

Kaioh Michiru had spoken words of power. It was Sailor Neptune, her mirror held before her chest, who looked to them with a face of quiet placid calm.

Uranus stared in wonder. "You. You're the one who's been stalking me."

Neptune knew if she dropped the Aqua Mirror it would not break, but all the same her grip on it tightened to a point she almost feared the metal would be deformed beneath the strength of her grip, her eyes widening in a concession to the true emotions beneath that gaze.

"You're....you're...."

Uranus nodded, her eyes narrowed, though there was more than a slight aura of fear in them, one that led to sadness in the gaze of Neptune.

Uranus quietly made a gesture to the Senshi to stand aside, Tuxedo Mask standing nearest them all the same, his arms crossed, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Uranus and Neptune stood, the shorter woman meeting the gaze of the taller with a supreme focus, willing herself to focus on the mission and not drowning in eyes that she knew were in truth those of Haruka, of her Haruka. 

"They attacked you?"

"They did. He was seeking people of power. They can sense us when we're not transformed. And.....we're not the only Senshi out there."

Her gaze turned to the northeast.

Uranus's did not follow her.

"They know who you are?"

"They do now. I couldn't let myself risk whatever scheme he had in mind unfolding unhindered." 

Uranus nodded, stiffly.

"I see." And then as much as she was able to do so, she relaxed.

"Means Kaioh Michiru will have to move, then, won't it?"

Neptune nodded, her face much quieter than her emotions. A cynical curl of Uranus's lips meant that she knew what was within her head, and Neptune wanted to flush at the keenness of her awareness.

Uranus smiled slightly crookedly. "The Kaiohs aren't on the best terms with the Tenohs, I think my father would give you a place to stay purely to spite Kaioh-kun."

Neptune's fists clenched slightly and she let herself refuse to breathe, lest the hope become too strong. Uranus's hand was on her shoulder, Haruka's hand was on her shoulder and she willed herself to meet the gaze. "And even if he doesn't, I'll still find a way." She saw a soft smile and let herself return it, her mask slipping slightly.

Then a sudden burst of dark energy drew all their gaze to the northeast, where Neptune's had flickered earlier.

Uranus nodded to her team, as thunderclouds began to draw around that area, then to Neptune. "Join us?"

Neptune nodded.

_A few minutes earlier, outskirts of the Hikawa Shrine:_

Hino Rei had just arrived when she saw the vision she had seen in the fires beginning to unfold. Darkness crept around the shrine like a low-hanging and thick fog, echoing with a supernatural maddened laughter. She felt hunger in the darkness, a malice at the existence of life, a desire to destroy it and to dance upon its graves. At its core there were one and a half entities, a man clad in armor and with hands that gleamed with light, a being that was and was not him without, the being laughing in the same note that he did. 

"Perhaps you are the Princess, little priestess. The old Queen and her spawn were shamans as they were rulers."

For a moment she saw an apparation stranger than Phobos and Deimos. She saw a cat with a gleaming sign on its forehead that tossed her an object that she grasped in her hands and then she felt light and heat from that object.

_Mars Crystal Power Make-Up!_

Fire burned outward and rippled with a brilliant flame and the shadows drew back in seeming fear. She felt herself changed, her clothes disintegrated, seemingly and rewoven into something that was leotard and skirt and gauntlets. Armor, a very powerfully woven armor that enhanced her powers and gave her direction over them. Fire called to her, and it was her, and there was light that burned within her being and she turned and stared at the being who sneered at her. 

"I am Sailor Mars, pretty suited sailor of love and chastisement! In the name of Mars I shall chastise you!"

The creature laughed beside the man and the man mirrored the laughter, and then he raised gauntleted hands and reality _twisted._

_She was inside her vision, in a shining palace, the sounds of strife around her. Battle and fury and the ending of worlds, as the Sun laughed audibly in the sky and the eyes of a vengeful god-thing empowered by the Nothingness turned its gaze on the world and saw its designs unfolding in full. She was in her Eternal armor, then, empowered by that force that was hers, as it always had been. She had felt Mercury die first, knew that death when she felt it. So brilliant, Mercury, but she was not up to fight in a total clash like this, not ringed by lesser monsters as she had been._

_Anger and fear burned in her hearts, and she turned to face a being of regal shape in a dark blue dress with a visceral organic staff. The creature that had been human once and now had a crown that had erupted from its brow and glowing eyes turned to her and laughed in a monstrous cacaphony._

**_Your kingdom is fallen, and your time is done. Now, in Metallia's light, in the true light of the Sun, your works shall burn and be as ashes....and so shall you._ **

_The staff turned toward her and she saw a terrible light that grew at its core and felt Nothingness at its heart, and the horror of the sight froze her as one dead.  
_

Kino Makoto had seen the light shining in its courses and then seen reality _twist_ and ephemoral phantoms of shadow hold the newly transformed being before her in a pattern that left her vulnerable to the kind of focus that was slowly being summoned over her. She growled.

"I _hate_ bullies," and then of all things a cat tossed something to her and she grasped it, calling its power into herself and through herself.

_Jupiter Crystal Power Make-Up!_

She had had dreams of flying and now it was not a dream. Now she was in the air, transformed, senses keener than humanity, stormclouds gathering overhead, and a figure turning to look at her in stupefied wonder. 

"Jupiter?"

His words were soft, and the shadow around him seemed to waver and to become mist, as the fire-being summoned her flames to banish the shadows when her trance dispelled.

She looked at him in turn.

"Nephrite?" The name came unbidden, not spoken by Kino Makoto and the eyes were familiar, not the burning coal-eyes that Rei and Mars had seen, but the original eyes of her lover in the past.

The Senshi of the Thunder, who was the Thunder and the Storm, hovered in air, feeling old emotions surge outward, wondering just what it was that she was seeing, why her instincts that had so readily driven off boys bullying a young girl with reddish hair were failing her here.

When the other Senshi and Tuxedo Kamen landed Nephrite cursed, and then unleashed a sudden wave of fire from heaven to strike them all, Mercury summoning her protective sphere to dispel it, and flew off, cursing his weakness. He could not fight Jupiter, not then, not like this. Beryl would not accept that weakness, he would have to strike again, and soon, in the hard way.

When Jupiter descended it was Kino Makoto who awoke, holding a henshin in her hands, as did Hino Rei.

Kino thought she was the brash and impulsive one, but it was Rei who held the henshin and introduced herself to the team with a "What the Hell just happened to me?" with an edge of panic and fear.

"You are the Senshi, the ones who have awakened in this time," spoke a voice that drew their eyes.

They all turned, to see a young Senshi with a red bow, right hand on the hilt of a blade in a bejeweled and ornate golden scabbard. Long platinum blonde hair went past her waist, and her eyes were hard and cold and cruel, the eyes of a general looking on her charges.

"You are the Senshi, and the Dark Kingdom is growing desperate."

Her words retained that cold edge.

"If you want more of an explanation than what you have...." she pointed to the shrine.

"Hino-sama, may we enter the shrine and talk there? It is a holy place, and a good one to discuss who the Senshi are, and our war, and what it is to wage war on good and evil. And the nature of these men, the ones who.....brought themselves into what is and what will be."

As one the Senshi nodded, and if Luna tackled Artemis with a happy pounce and the two rejoiced in reunion after so long, the Senshi did not focus on it then, awed by the sight of Sailor V in her own mask, akin to that of Tuxedo Kamen, and they followed her, instinctively falling into the pattern honed in the old days, when Sailor V had commanded them all with a brutish approach that had worked well until the Old Enemy broke its bonds and all had fallen.

For the first of many times, the Senshi gathered, Mars and Jupiter resuming their Senshi faces casually to fit in with the rest, and they sat around a table with V standing in a military posture, rigid, her eyes meeting them all, head cocked curiously at Uranus for a long time, and then with a deep sigh, Sailor V began to speak and to tell them the fullness of what she had known since she had defeated Ace and destroyed the Dark Agency in the terrible Battle of Nuremberg, knowing what it was that must be said.


	8. Codename: Sailor V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Minako Aino tells her tale, and Nephrite tries to ambush Kino Makoto.

_Hikawa Shrine, meeting room:_

"My journey as a Senshi began one day when I met a talking cat. His name was Artemis." She smiled wanly. "Yes, a male cat named Artemis, after an old goddess of the hunt. He showed me my way to a Henshin when I was attacked by a Youma, and I took that pen in my hand. Then I was able to transform, and I became what you see here," and she gestured to herself, from her mask to her fuku, to the blade at her side. "Sailor V. The first of the Senshi to awaken. I've fought the Dark Kingdom in Japan, in Europe, and in the United Kingdom. In that time I have learned much of them, and at the end of it, I remembered everything, the Fall of the Silver Millennium, what they are, and who they are." 

Her voice had become sad then.

"I had to make a great sacrifice, one that has my civilian face screaming at night, and my parents know something bad happened but they cannot guess the fullness of what it was, and why it was."

Of the nature of that sacrifice she spoke little, instead tapping a small gemstone on her gauntlet, and then there was a hologram of nine planets, each with specific symbols.

"In the time before time, long, long ago, when Gods walked the Earth and the Moon, there was a kingdom of nine planets called the Lunar Kingdom. It was linked by a network of portals in space called the World-Tree." Her smile was wan. "It was a beautiful place, founded by a near-legendary Queen, Selene, who built the first Lunar Kingdom and under whom Lunarians discovered our immortality and our power. We were guardians, then, our great-grandmothers were. They were protectors who fought and under whose swords and mirrors and glaives and gauntlets the Moon Kingdom expanded and became great.

Then there was Queen Selenity of the Golden Age, who established the Lunar Empire. Under her we gained.....places of power, and became not simply guardians but near-divine figures of majesty and respect. Selenity's Senshi wore fukus of armor, full body armor. I would call it the age of Onna Bugeisha. It was the age when the Nine Planets were united by the World-Tree and took on their shapes. Mercury, a planet of knowledge and wisdom and machines, led by its forge-lords and its day to day government in the hand of a Fabricator General. My planet, Venus, led by a Council of Seven, the planet of love and the planet that produced the Sei-i-tai shogun, who commanded the armies of the Lunar Kingdom."

Both Uranus and Neptune stirred. "Your predecessor was the Shogun?"

Venus smiled, unkindly. "My grandmother and mother were. So was I. The realm of Selenity saw generational shifts, the founding Senshi fell in the Unity, and so did their successors. They were pitted against a nameless fear they called the Great Enemy, a name that the generation that followed, that of Queen Serenity, spoke nothing of. Her mother died on the battlefield along with our mothers, in what was called the Battle of the Star-Fall. There was a great enemy who revealed herself, supposedly a fallen Senshi clad in gold, wielding the Blade of Stars. She attacked our worlds, and in a terrible cataclysm half the population of the immortal realm fell, slain at her hands, and then she was driven to the heart of all that is."

Uranus froze for a moment. Her dreams had shown a tall woman in beautiful dresses with long white hair who had spoken in hushed awe and used that phrase.

"A Galaxy Cauldron at the heart of our Galaxy, where science sees a black hole. She pursued this fallen Golden Queen there and there was a battle to shake the universe, and when she returned she was pregnant, and from her was born Princess Serenity, and the last generation of Senshi in the old days. Mercury, Venus, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. It is said when Serenity was born that a Queen of Dreams appeared and instilled a curse that in a thousand years the love of the Princess would cast the fires of doom to all that was, but I was not alive then, and only have rumors and old stories half-remembered to go from. Half-remembered because the me that heard them was a child."

The Senshi looked around. "We....don't see Saturn or Pluto, and there's him." It was Mars who spoke, pointing to Tuxedo Mask.

Venus turned and nodded. "There was a power on the Earth, a very great power, one that could rival the moon. A Golden Crystal, and a Silver Crystal. But the Earth never produced a Senshi, the wielders of the Golden Crystal were always men. Saturn was the Senshi of Death and Rebirth, and I never met her. Nor do I know what a Senshi of Death would even be. Pluto....is Guardian of Time, who exists outside it, and has always existed, and will always exist. If she joins us, it is a matter of fear and trembling, not of rejoicing. Or it was, then."

So it came to pass that the last phase of the Lunarian civilization, the Silver Millennium unfolded. The Outer Senshi guarded the frontiers, dispelling great forces, and the Inners lived in the light of the moon. Princess Serenity and the Queen were....different," and Venus grimaced, the memories of the bitter arguments and the times she'd had to console the Princess and dispel the furies that grew in her heart a thing that stabbed at her still. "I spent much time trying to aid them. Those differences drove the Queen to pre-emptively outlaw travel to the Earth, which I suppose is what drew the Princess to Endymion, Crown Prince of the Earth. He was forbidden, and he would be a thing hers, and only hers. It was believed to be the love that doomed us all, but it was not."

Her eyes flickered to Neptune. "Who it was that did so, I will not say. We are here. The Princess, presumably, has been reborn, too. They are seeking her. That's why they've been looking to attack first one who kept her secret hidden," and her gaze turned to Neptune again, "and those who did not know they had a secret to keep."

She sighed. "That is why I am here, now. The Shogun, come to take command of my Daimyo, to wield and to hone you into a spear unyielding against the infinite darkness of the Enemy."

Her face was haunted again. "I have seen the kind of price necessary to destroy it. You have not, I think."

Neptune coughed, slightly. "I have. I destroyed their operations in the Western hemisphere, in the time when I came to understand I....was as I was. My father had roving business there to set up a set of factories, which he did so, and in the process I destroyed the Dark Kingdom's Western bases. There was only one other I let myself love, then, and I saw her dead." And she stared as haunted and said no more.

"We have repelled the attacks of the first of these Shitennou, the Four Heavenly Kings. Once the protectors and the Guardians of the Prince of the Earth, and the commander of the Four Hosts. We have made their leader desperate."

"Who is their leader?" Uranus spoke then, wary.

"After the death of....the first leader, Jadeite, we encountered a woman with a strange.......headdress, i think. A big bone-shaped V, in a dark blue dress with a very strange staff. She was angry at us for killing her general and vowed that she would find the princess and have her slain."

Sailor V froze in mute horror, her gaze directed at Uranus. " _You fought Queen **Beryl**_?" A painful note of raw fear turned the last word into a high-pitched near-shriek.

"Yes, we did. Who is she?"

"She was a sorceress of the Earth, who claimed that Princess Serenity the Cauldron-Born was an inhuman monster, that the Senshi were all monsters. She promised power to fight their power, but she went from sorceress to someone corrupted and ruined by dark power. She claimed the heart of the Sun wanted the monsters dead, and instead she served a greater monster. Metallia. Once a Jotunness, a primordial being of fire. She proclaimed herself the World-Destroyer of the land of the World-Destroyers, and this is what she delivered. At the end, in the final battle, we were all slain, one by one, and only the Princess lived in that last sight long enough to see her mother activate a great spell that cast us into the future, flinging our light here.

It appears as the light has awoken, either the Darkness returned, or perhaps it returned and it is our task to cast it out for all time."

Silence fell in the Shrine, and then Moon's stomach rumbled and she flushed as eyes turned to her.

A couple of nervous laughs erupted and it was Mars who quietly ordered food from a takeout place and promised to pay on delivery, and then that silence remained.

"So this Beryl is bad news, then?"

"She is. She destroyed all life in the Solar system except on Earth, once. She could and would gladly do so again. Her goal, I believe, is to bring Metallia to this world in full, that's why she keeps trying to harvest energy to do so."

Silence again.

Uranus stood, then, the only one standing besides her, and hit her fist into her other palm.

"Then we find them, and we kill them. Justice, for the kingdom that fell, and for all those who suffer in the world that is now."

Venus let herself smile sadly, hearing an echo in these words of the idealism of the former princess.

"I hope it will be that easy."

\-------

They had eaten pizza, they had taken the next steps of trust to de-transform and to exchange names and phone numbers, taking steps at first to fight and to protect each other. Kino Makoto had lived alone, but in the event of the attack on Neptune it was deemed unwise that she do so, and so she found herself assigned space at the Hikawa Shrine itself. It was on her way to her old apartment to get her things that the shadows rose again and Nephrite loomed from them, smiling and hurling fire from heaven at her. In a flash of light it was Sailor Jupiter who hovered before him in air, lightning crackling around her gauntlets.

"It ish you," his broken voice slurred. "She lieth to ush. She madeth ush monshthers."

He seemed to weaven drunkenly. "I wash a genrul. I ledth armeesh. Now here..."

He wept, and then seemed to compose himself with a visible, painful effort. "She put a daemon in me, Jupiter. We know what Venus did, when she slew Danburite. She had that strength. If you knew who I was to you, and what I was, you would not be able to do this. So....forgive me, in the future, when you do."

And with that the shadows boiled and fire lanced from them and he lunged at her, engulfing himself in his shadows.

Jupiter reacted on instinct, having no training as yet.

By the time Uranus and Neptune and Tuxedo Mask had arrived, Moon and Venus and Mars following, her bolt of lightning had done its work, and with a gaping hole in his chest, the last words of Nephrite of the Dark Kingdom were "As beautiful as on the last day of the Silver Millennium, my queen of thunder."

And then he crumbled into dust and there was only a stone left, one that Tuxedo Mask quietly joined with the other, holding it with sorrow as memories that had been buried woke and haunted his very being, flowing through his mind.

In the de-transformed Kino Makoto there was a great emptiness and sorrow and she heard a wail that echoed in flashes of thunder and lightning across a cloudless sky, Jupiter mourning for her lost love, and for a moment her hands crackled with lightning and she fell to her knees, the sorrow that visceral even if she did not understand. The other Senshi and Tuxedo Mask stared uncomprehendingly, and then moved away.

Only Venus, who understood all too well put her hand on Kino's shoulder, and in that moment of sympathy and understanding, the first steps of a friendship were forged.

\----------

_D Point:_

Beryl's rage smote the sky with blasts of dark energy and the vengeful shrieks of a maddened Queen of darkness, whose power surged with corrupt nature to herself.

"He did not find her!" She raged. "He died, and he did not find her! They killed him!"

Zoisite could not resist a sneer, his hand holding his love's tightly. "He was weak. He was always weak, even before you showed us the light." Beryl froze and her glowing eyes turned to them.

"Weak, was he? You think you can do better?"

And then her eyes glowed differently and a guttural voice smote the sky as that other _thing_ spoke through her mouth:

**_If you are so confident in your abilities, loverboys, go there. Kill them all._ **

Zoisite reacted with stupefied worry but Kunzite laughed with his rich, deep confident laugh. 

"That won't be a challenge, great Queen," And the two Shitennou knelt, then, and in a flash of dark energy were at the Dark Kingdom's base in Osaka, looking at the knowledge transmitted by the dying thoughts of their former comrades with whom they had all been close, back in the day.

"Well, my love?"

Their eyes turned to the image of a being who had the power of a Senshi who had no truthful means to be reborn, with white hair and a sword that gleamed with fire and fury, a symbol blazing on her forehead. A gleaming light in the form of a semicircle, of golden power and beauty. 

"Do you see what it is that I see?" Kunzite's voice, dark and rich and enhanced by the powers surging through him spoke, the infrasound aspects giving a slight vibration.

"I do."

He turned and kissed Zoisite, drawing the smaller man into a deep kiss that reflected his love, one that had grown and had shown him that love was more than what the Senshi said, for in the midst of a power they deemed Anathema they had found it, and found something wondrous and joyful, that made the harsh times since resurrection less so.

"If that means what I think it means, we have our first target."

Another image appeared, a being clad in a sleveeless fuku with a bright green skirt and green bands on the edges of her gauntlets and high-heels and dark blue bows.

"Neptune loved the Princess, in a former life. If we are to show ourselves superior to the weak one, we will go for the Moon Princess's heart and reveal her, and the Crystal alike."

The two lovers shared a conspiratorial smile, and Kunzite's left hand moved away from his lover and seemed to form a talon that caressed the edges of her face and gleamed with an energy that cast a deep chill in the room and gleamed like serrated claws.

"Neptune, we're coming for you."

Then he picked up Zoisite like a bride and carried him to a bed that was unused, casually calling on a bit of his powers to blow off dust from the bed and tossing his lover there, straddling him.

"But first, love, it has been too long since we let ourselves yield to this."


	9. 'Some Deep Organizing Power'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the darkness near the Galaxy Cauldron Galaxia broods on her defeat, and feels the stirrings of the Dark Kingdom. 
> 
> Zoisite goes to awaken the Seven Great Youma, while Kunzite transforms the guests and workers of a hair salon into a Youma to bait a trap for Sailors Neptune and Uranus.

_Galactica Flagship:_

She had fled here on this starship in ancient ages, long, long before the current cycle of Senshi had begun. That it survived at all was a testament to the Senshi magic at every level of its engineering, from the great to the sub-atomic. She had been a Senshi in the age before Queen Selenity, when she had woken on a no-account world near the Cauldron, empowered at a level beyond the greater. She had unleashed cycles of Senshi Wars, harrowing the weak and unworthy Guardians. Yet it survived all the same, and it was here, and so was she. She called it a flagship, and it was one, with ancient weaponry meant for foes more powerful than those of this epoch. She felt that power and it called to her and she to it, and she hummed within the core of her being to feel it and to know it ,and to know that it felt and it knew her. 

It was a ship of darkness, illuminated only by the cold light of stars, stars deprived of their star-seeds by her first and earliest harvests from back in the day. A ship of darkness where she strode unerringly toward her throneroom and let herself sit down in her command throne. Her fingers tapped against the right arm of her throne, and then red light shone, the color of blood, the color that she loved best. With her sword in its scabbard pointed at the dais and her body resting heavily on it, the metal denting the ground before the throne slightly, she seemed as weary as she felt, the last monarch of a long-dead line, her world the first of all of them that she had slain, and her deeds had drawn other Senshi and the eyes of Chaos and before Chaos's eyes she had slain them and taken their Star-Seeds and then turned toward Chaos, which had fled from her, seemingly, beckoning her here.

She had not fought in several millennia but her skills were not rusty, for she had continued to try to wage clashes with Chaos and she made it scream, and she made it bleed. She would kill it, eventually. She needed power, she needed glory, she needed the thrill of death and of dying and seeing bodies twitching and growing cold. The woman in the dress, that 'Queen' Serenity. She had wounded her, shattered her pauldron, left her to recover and lick her wounds. Then her Sun had consumed her a millennium later, by which time she had healed and slain five worlds in recompense for the insult.

Her worlds had died and the light of Serenity had faded.

And yet.....

Her throne revealed before her the stars of the Galaxy, and halfway between the center and the rim, her gaze turned to a set of stars, including one with a sickly hue, poisoned by a creature of Chaos that had set its throne within its heart.

Her eyes widened, and then narrowed, and a cold smile worked its way to her face.

"You live, Serenity," she cackled. "Or at least your daughter does! You _live!_ "

She rose from her throne in a starship where she was alone beneath the eyes of infinite space and drew her blade, which shone with a light as bright as that of her own Sun, which she had harvested the full power of to forget her blade and to strengthen it. The light of a caged star gleamed from her blade and her own eyes reflected its light, and mad laughter echoed.

"I will find you, daughter of Serenity! I shall reforge your little thralls and darlings into my soulless queens,and you shall die to them or kill them all, and either way your light shall die!"

She laughed again, and then her hands were spread wider. "I WILL FIND YOU!"

Her sword erupted in lances of her fire, her majestic force rippling outward. The darkness laughed and it hissed with anticipation. She ignored it. She was not Chaos's servants, they were aligned in vengeance. Serenity would be broken beneath her feet, and then she would be dead.

Light gleamed from her eyes, and a dead flagship hummed into life. After nine hundred years of brooding in darkness on the ignominy of her only defeat, Galaxia the Harvester of Souls was on the move again.

"I shall make the Galaxy bleed, I shall make the Heavens burn, and the stars shall weep my name in horror," she hissed. Her starship had seen every star around the cauldron deprived of its seeds, which rested in her gallery, a gallery without protectors. She would resume her harvests, cleansing worlds of their unworthy populations, and she would find a new Sailor Chi and a new Sailor Psi, soulless things to guard a gallery of souls. She would gather other servants, things meant to test her foes, to prove their starseeds worthy of harvest. If they slew them, they would be worthy. If they were slain ,they would be harvested and then her harvesters rewarded in turn.

Her ship moved with sedate calm.

One world she had ignored on the path to Earth, halfway to it, some 12,000 light years hence. A world called Kinmoku, Planet of Fragrant Olives, with three moons and Senshi called Starlights.

She had defeated a previous iteration of those Starlights, but their seeds had evaded her by the fall of the Kinmoku Queen. Not a defeat, but not a victory. Now she would return. Now, the Fragant Olives would be dead trees bleached beneath the uncaring gaze of sterile starlight.

But first, there were worlds to harvest, souls to claim, despair to slake.

\----------

_Dark Kingdom Base:_

"I shall look forward to seeing which of our works reaps results first, my love," purred Zoisite. In his hands were seven rainbow crystals, and before them seven pods. 

"I suspect mine shall first, my love," responded Kunzite with cruel amusement. "Your Youma shall await as you draw them together for your great attack on the Senshi. Mine..."

He looked at the Youma-seeds.

"Those poor humans shall not know what struck them."

He grinned coldly. "And we shall see if it is Moon that is the true princess, or if it is the False Uranus hiding behind a cunning mask that would deceive the willfully blind."

The two shared a deep and loving kiss, and then strode out to their tasks.

Zoisite would hunt, and he would hunt in a cunning fashion, drawing his first Youma within hours and bringing the creature in a trance to their base. That had been a thing of fortune, he knew that the other six would be more complicated, especially the last, whose host presented the triple difficulties of being near a Shinto shrine.

\----------

_Hair Salon, Tokyo Commercial District:_

When Kunzite made his entrance, he made it theatrical. Light cut out in the salon, and the darkness that fell on it was not true darkness, but the smothering Nothingness of Chaos and of its endless hunger. The women and the one man in the salon trembled in fear, uncertain as to what awaited them. The darkness consolidated into a man clad in a military-like outfit with a breastplate of obsidian veined with silver and gold, who hurled objects at them that struck them in the veins of their necks and burrowed in, and then he incanted in a dark and unhallowed tongue, as the people slouched toward each other in a trance and then in a grisly process that caused the salon to erupt outward, a gigantic creature that roared in a terrible sonic shriek. 

Within mere minutes of its bellow and its stalking onto the streets in a rampage, the lights of the Senshi moving toward it were visible, and it was nothing to a Shitennou trained in old Terran magick and that of the Dark Kingdom to see one at the edges whose motion brought a faint salt tinge to the air (and that smell gave his nostrils a sense of burning that he willingly ignored). His hands crackled with dark energy and then he smiled and drew his fists back. The Youma drew from its hands a razor like a great chain-sword, and gleefully rampaged hewing down streetlights, bellowing in wrathful fury.

Dark energy lanced out and struck Sailor Neptune straight in the heart, and she fell from a great height, in half-conscious agony toward the ground.

Uranus froze for a moment, horror entering her, and the feelings that had grown from staring at Neptune and quietly for Michiru, even knowing the stalking was there, warred against her greater duty.

Even if the Youma was a damned big bastard, with Jupiter, Mars, Mask, Mercury, and Moon on the same side it would be simple enough for them to dispatch it.

She had a Senshi's life to save and she swooped downward, catching Neptune like Superman in those movies she'd watched as a kid caught Lois Lane, and then another bolt of Dark Energy struck her in the side and she fell too, pain coursing through her.

Her fellow Senshi landed and in their trained practice cast fog to disorient the Youma, which indeed paused and then snarled at an infrasound level that rumbled through the ground and set off a chorus of car alarms.

Uranus hit the ground with a sickening crunch, looking to see another of the Shitennou moving, his smile harsh and cruel, and then he fired more bolts of dark Energy that hurled her away from Neptune, reaching out to her feebly.

"Children," he growled. "You're just children. And you killed Nephrite. You killed Jadeite. I am not so weak as they were, little child."

The Youma fought the Senshi and it wailed in pain as the strikes of their powers lanced into it, snarling in pain that only doubled its frenzy.

He drew a great blade charged with his powers, hoisting it over Neptune's chest like Van Helsing over a vampire in its coffin.

"This is power, not the weak imitations of the old Senshi that you pretend to be."

A gleaming blade of Dark Energy sliced into Neptune with a sickening crunch and a sick fear filled Uranus, and she glared in anger. 

The sight of an impaled Neptune showed her what she did feel, and she blinked and growled and then raised her own blade.

Words spoke, for the first time, words of something hidden within her:

_Moon Healing Escalation._

Her forehead gleamed with that upturned half-moon and Kunzite stared stupidly as the energy collided into him and hurled him into a building with a sickening crunch and a boom that left him gasping for breath. 

Uranus, or the one who had thought herself Uranus, knelt beside Neptune, whose breathing was slowing. 

"No," she wept, with a voice that was and wasn't hers. "I remember now. It's not fair, I just get you back to see you die again? NO!"

A blast of energy erupted from her sword toward the Youma, which was weakening and slowing from the attacks of the Senshi, cleaving through Mercury's fog like a great blade of light. The light slammed into the Youma and from its presence now slept twenty-four people and a horrified gasp of disgusted awe from the Senshi reflected their reaction to that discovery. Uranus, or that which had been her, held Neptune, rocking and weeping, warring beings striving to command her flesh, light gleaming with a power that made Kunzite tremble.

"Oh my Gods, you were the Princess. You really were. Shit, I didn't bring enough power," he wheezed, body smoking with the nature of the blast that struck him, and he called on his power to prepare to teleport when he saw a sparkling light in her tear that made him freeze in sudden awe and remembrance.

The light became a crystal in her hand, a Silver Crystal.

"Oh shit," he breathed softly, as the being that had seemed to be Uranus took the crystal and then placed at the wound in Neptune's chest, and light gleamed.

A soul was called back, mighty and vast as the oceans she commanded, the wound healing, the blood vanishing, and then Neptune took a great wrenching breath and gasped, the agony appearing only to fade, and she stared at the light of the Silver Crystal.

She would be so angry if it was Bun-Head who.....

Then the light faded and she felt dull, deceived.

It was the Silver Crystal, held only by the Moon Kingdom, and it was in the hands of Tenoh Haruka, whose older Fuku had shifted, and who stared in mute horror as it began to form a dress.

"No, No! NO!"

She began to tear at the dress as the Senshi turned to face her in sudden stupefied awe.

It was Moon who knelt first, recognizing in the dress and in the reaction against it her Princess, and she knelt with her own symbol of the Moon gleaming. The sisters, daughters of Serenity, were united once more, and part of her rejoiced and part of her felt sorrow.

Venus knelt too, quietly, horrified to realize that this was the person who held the burden greater than her own. A person who pretended to great strength but was soft, someone who would need to be toughened to bear the burdens of the throne.

Mercury and Mars and Jupiter knelt next by instinct, light gleaming from their heads, crystals shining there as they did with Moon, and as Tuxedo Mask knelt too, his body gleamed with golden light though there was no crystal there, yet.

For a moment only Neptune stood in horrified shock as the dress had seemed to tear and to become rags, only to creep back up along her body until Haruka gave up and stared in mute horror and defeat, tears flowing down her face.

Michiru Kaioh fell to her knees. The Moon gave and the Moon took, but it and its shining Crystal Palace always won.

Haruka's eyes met hers in a desperate plea, old memories activated in full and she could only kneel, her eyes closed, and emotions that had been buried unlocked.

The Moon seemed to shift in orbit then, as night fell with suddenness that was not entirely natural, and astronomers in the dark side of the world stared in horrified awe at the sight. The Moon shifted and then a ray of light struck out from it, and the Senshi and their Princess were called to the Moon and to a dead palace, of bones where the old Kingdom had fallen, and a Ghost awoke, preparing at at last with a mixture of emotions concealed behind a veil for what would be a difficult reunion.

\---------

_Galactica Flagship:_

Light pulsed on the world where the Shadow had drowned the Light. Galaxia saw the Light and her laughter grew the greater.

"I shall bleed the Heavens, Serenity, and then I shall bleed you!"


	10. Ruins:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A mother and daughter are reunited as Kunzite and Zoisite re-tool their schemes. 
> 
> Metallia speaks to Beryl.

_The Former Crystal Palace Gates, Mare Tranquilitas, Luna:_

When the Apollo Expedition had found the immense and opulent ruins that sprawled seemingly across a fair-sized portion of the Moon, it had been a day of wonder and surprise. The ruins had been seen with earlier satellite flybys of the Moon, mostly intact but with signs of a terrible battle. The Apollo expedition had been followed by a Soyuz expedition launched by the Soviet Union, both superpowers focused keenly on proof of what was seen as evidence of extraterrestrial life. Both astronauts and cosmonauts had described a strange place. It seemed unfathomably ancient and yet there was no dust and a serene beauty marred by the mutilated and destroyed skeletons that lay before them, traces of a terrible battle. 

It was a haunted place, a land of ghosts and phantoms. And it was here that the Senshi and Tuxedo Mask found themselves when the ray brought them.

Tenoh Haruka, still vainly tugging at the dress saw her hands drop as the memories flooded through her, and they did so through Tuxedo Mask as well, and then through Tsukino Usagi, all of them falling to their knees. Tears fell that froze in the coldness of the moon, only their Senshi powers permitting them to be here unharmed absent a spacesuit.

Then the gates opened and they saw an image standing before them. She was tall, taller than Haruka by a head, and her hair too was white, in long flowing odango pigtails so akin to that of Tsukino Usagi that all eyes turned to her as well.

She was a ghost in a machine, a hologram with an AI, a torch flung far into the future awaiting when magick came round and the Senshi and their great enemies were reborn.

Queen Serenity looked to Haruka and to Usagi, and bowed the bow of a superior to her inferiors.

"Serenity, Artemis," she bowed to both of them, and Usagi looked at her strangely. and then her eyes widened.

"Welcome to the Palace that was yours once, and shall be again," and the ghost raised her hands and then in the silent unlit palace she turned her back and spoke:

"Let there be light!"

And there was light.

The Senshi gasped in mute horror as the bones were visible.

"Are any of them ours?"

It was a terrified squeak from Mercury but it did get a response from Queen Serenity who turned and nodded sorrowfully.

"Your souls were sent forward in time, but the bones remain, awaiting a fate that shall follow a great clash and a time of strife."

"What time?" It was Haruka who asked now as she still tried to tear the dress and had to finally groan with resignation that it went nowhere.

"Now."

Her eyes turned to Venus and she bowed more deeply, a bow that Sailor V returned.

"She would have told you of the Dark Kingdom and of Beryl, yes?"

They nodded.

"She told you of the Fall, for that is what she remembered, and of the history that she knew. She was, after all, the Shogun of my armies, so hers was a task focused on old lore and myth."

Queen Serenity's face was grim, for a moment. Then she turned to her daughters.

"Serenity," and her voice was warm yet threaded with regret. Her daughter looked at her, a wariness and respect blended with the old hostility.

"I did you a great wrong in the past seeking to reshape you into what I sought. It drove you to Endymion, and then to Neptune. Love is the beating heart of Senshi power and I sought to replace it with a stone."

For a moment her expression resembled Haruka's when troubled and that brought her to silence.

"It is a new world now, my daughter. You and your younger sister, Artemis....you must reshape it. My world died and it died in fire, not at the sword of the Golden Queen but from an old enemy I believed sealed, because I disregarded a curse."

Their eyes met.

"I shall seek to guard and to protect you all, as much as I can. The Crystal was mine and the legacy of our ancestors from Queen Selene, founder of the Lunar realm. For now I know most of what it can do, in the old days and by the old ways."

Again her face saw a shadow pass.

Then she looked from Haruka to Usagi and back again.

"You are my Cauldron-Born, an elder heir, and a younger one. The Princess, and the Senshi of the Moon, whose light was to serve in the way her sister wished. I did not anticipate that the Cauldron would give me a second child, but it did."

She clicked her teeth, slightly.

"That was then, and I was wrong. You were right. To ask you to endure that your friends fight for you, and if necessary...die for you....was too much. Not without your coming to fight along with them. I wanted a gilded paradise," her hand moved and they saw the full beauty, even as they moved carefully to avoid the skeletons of Lunarian armies and those touched by the Great Enemy.

They walked seemingly for a long time into the interior of the palace, arriving at a ballroom.

"It was here," the two daughters of Serenity gasped.

"Yes, it was." Queen Serenity's face was mournful.

"It was here that the forces touched by the Great Enemy brought all of this down."

There were ten skeletons near each other, traces of bows and elements of Senshi armor still visible and noting who was whom. The skeletons of Neptune and the Princess were together, and so were those of Endymion and of the old Sailor Moon.

"The Dark Kingdom has returned as have you, and they are moving to a great final confrontation. They will bring their dread God by sacrifice, or so they believe, but they are wrong. It is not that Metallia needs this, she is punishing them for their failures in their service to her in the old days. it is the way of the Great Enemy, the Golden Queen showed that to me well enough in our battle."

It was Haruka who asked: "You keep mentioning a Golden Queen."

"Galaxia, the Soul-Harvester. By her sword worlds have died since there have been worlds. Where life arises, so do Senshi to protect it. As she tells it she rose on a no-account world that is now dead, the first that she destroyed. She harvests souls, the very seeds of the stars that would otherwise go to the heart of all that is. She came here, when my mother died fighting her on the battlefield, and I drove her off, and fought her and defeated her at the heart of all that is. I could not kill her, for hers is a power that proved too great for me, and for my paths as I expected them to unfold. It took much out of me, and so I could seal Metallia within the Sun but not ward out her poisons."

She laughed, slow and sadly. "As I said, my ways were tried. They died in darkness here, a darkness that is not night. There is nothing in shadows or night that are evil, indeed the mightiest of all my Senshi are Pluto, Guardian of Time, and Saturn, Guardian of Death and Rebirth. Their powers are the darker ones that bring death and decay and finality, yet they are as loyal as any of you, and you shall meet them in time, and be grateful for their aid. It was not darkness itself that devoured this, but the Great Enemy, the Nothingness behind reality. Ever does it go in so many faces, always hating the light of the Senshi, hungry to devour our souls and to dance on our graves."

Usagi trembled but Haruka asked, a determined note of steel in her voice. "Does this enemy have a name?"

"Chaos."

The other Senshi found them, then, and they gasped in shock and horror and muted awe at the sight of their former bodies, Neptune going to almost the pallor of the grave seeing her own body holding the former body of the princess, her eyes turning to Haruka with a muted sense of....everything...within.

"Chaos was the name of the Great Enemy in my time, and it is so now," as she addressed all of the Senshi. "Beryl was a Sorceress of the Earth, once, empowered by its Golden Crystal. Then she was taken by Metallia and given the lies of Chaos, all in pursuit of an old love that I suspect where once it was, there is nothing, now."

And her eyes turned to Mamoru. "She believed my manly daughter was a monster not worth the hand of the crown prince of her world but believed that Chaos would grant her power the equal of mine, to make her worthy, and to overthrow the Moon for the Earth. Power, at least, Chaos did grant her. Power to kill, to ruin, but nothing more."

She folded her hands across her chest. "Beryl is a monster now but she was not one, once. and that is how Chaos works. Even Metallia was another being before it sank its talons into her. Once a splendid being of power to destroy and create alike, fallen into ruin. You cannot heal them, for there is only Chaos within them."

Usagi's eyes watered. To think of someone corrupted, become a monster, dedicated only to slaughter.

"I am sorry, sweet Artemis, but the enemy cannot be trusted, nor healed."

Her gaze turned to the sword.

"You, my heir and namesake, Princess Serenity," and then Haruka fell to her knees, not by compulsion nor by instinct, but by the crushing awareness of everything and the memories of her mother and long and bitter arguments between them, and of hearing the words the old her had waited so long to hear, "you are the shield and the blade against that darkness. Against your light it shall strive in vain and yet it shall fail. The curse you bear is that you must take the loyalty of all of these women and of the Prince of the Earth," as she raised her hands, palms up, and her light shone and gleamed around and through them. "You must take it, knowing that they will bleed for you, fight for you, die for you. Yet yours with the Crystal is the might to bring them, or the Earth itself, to life anew. And even the Crystal Kingdom itself."

Her gaze turned to that Crystal. "You have the power of a God in that crystal, my daughter. To bring life anew, the power over souls. To cleanse them and to re-embody them, to recreate the flesh and the soul alike."

Haruka looked at the Crystal with fear. "Mother, I don't want this. Nobody should have this kind of power."

Queen Serenity gave her a sad smile. "It is that which shows you most worthy of it. Those who worship force and power most are those least equipped to wield them."

"To have the power of a God in itself is no great thing, for in untrained hands it can grant endurance but not triumph. You have the Crystal, you have your loves, and you have your fate. I am not the ruler any more, I am a ghost among the bones of the heroic and the traitorous dead alike."

She walked and she knelt beside the body of the daughter she had born, her skeleton intertwined with Neptune and holes punctured through them.

"This is the price of failure, and when I had the power to decide. And now......." she smiled wanly. "I will do all in my power to help you. Beryl is sending the fallen Shitennou to fight you, and they will come with great vengeance and furious anger, for their time draws short. She does not yet grasp the nature of the treachery of her supposed ally, but by the time she does...."

Their gaze turned to the Earth, whose night side reflected the Eastern hemisphere lit in beautiful traces of electricity.

"I did not prove strong enough against the powers of Chaos and the magic of Earth. But you are not me. You are....better, I hope. Different, in any event. In the past, I wanted a sweet songbird in a golden cage who knew nothing of the terrors arrayed against us, and I pushed far too hard. Now....everything that I despised may become the very root of salvation for the Earth, for the bones of the old Kingdom, and of all else besides."

And silence remained for a long time, the Senshi standing amidst the bones of the old battle and their old bodies, and the two daughters of the Queen of the Moon standing near their mother's near-ghost, whose hand was on their bones.

\---------

_D Point, Throne of Queen Beryl:_

The orb was silent. Beryl did not look further, for she had seen something that troubled her. 

_Zoisite and Kunzite shall die,_ she spoke in sorrow. _And the youma with them. Yet your power grows, my Queen. How is that possible? Was it not that we needed to feed your ascension?_

She was frozen on the throne, her veins glowing, as a thing that remained within the Sun crouched and spoke to her in a voice of audible power that made her DD Girls and Thetis tremble. 

**_Now you begin to understand. You failed me, Beryl, all of you failed me. The Senshi were to be destroyed and they have returned. The accursed moon spawn have produced not one Senshi but two. The little songbird has become a warrior in the rough, the old Senshi has been reborn the more powerful. Once before I trusted to you their doom and you were able to wound them but not to kill them. Now I give you reward for failure. Limited power and the death by inches of all the mightiest of your mighty, born as monsters, and dying as them. I do not reward failure kindly, little girl._ **

Laughter echoed like peals of thunder and it seemed like pillars of fire fell from the Sun toward the Arctic. the Sun briefly assuming the shape of a smiling face of great menace that looked with cruel laughter.

\--------

_Dark Kingdom Base:_

The first of the Rainbow Crystal holders was found and imprisoned, and then there had come the second. Kunzite had joined Zoisite with this one, taking the soldier unawares and a single powerful bolt of dark energy bringing him first to his knees and then to stupefied slumber. Kunzite seemed frenzied and terrified, and that was before the Sun _changed._ When it did, they tried to hide beneath their building and yet they could see it, the eyes, the eyes, the _eyes_ that glowered at them, and heard a voice that spoke in awe-inspiring power. 

They saw a giant that had hidden within the Sun, a being whose presence was easily large enough to grasp the Earth in a hand.

It spoke to them in menace:

**_Stars are the captured essence of my world, woven in warp and weft by Gods Whose gaze has turned away from humankind for a time. Your foes and your allies alike all hinge around them, and yet it is our nature, we who dwell in darkness amidst such fires, to command their might in a manner that you, O children of Luna and of its foes dare not grasp._ **

**_The more fools you, ensnared in a trap to which you and your servants alike shall know so very little. Raise thy armies, go forth and fight and die children of Midgard. Surtr's sword shall burn your bones such that no artifice of the Silver Crystal can set it aright again no matter what it is that thee and thine do. For me and for my destruction of worlds thou hast sold thy fate and thy adherence to the light of thy queen on the Moon._ **

The giant that looked at them seemed a being of lava in part, and yet her eyes gleamed like terrible suns and there was a monstrous terror that was not at all hidden within the essence of her being, a sick Nothingness that seemed to drain the very essence of reality around her or it. It oozed malice and in the weight of its presence reality rebelled, it sought to assert _rightness_ yet there was nothing to assert for them there. 

**_You have my permission to fight, heedless of the orders of my servant, for it is what you were resurrected for. Perhaps you can kill the Senshi. Their powers are fledgling, and if you did, it would be to your advantage. You sold your souls to me for fear of your lord's love of that wondrous and shining light. Now you grasp the nature of what you have sold at last, as did they._ **

Kunzite and Zoisite looked upon and beheld the terrible God to which they had sold their fate. 

They at one time would have expected to bow in honor and fear and trembling.

Now they were in fear and trembling all right and wished to call upon the mountains to cover them and the valleys to shield them and yet all there was was laughter, cold and terrible, and then the dark crystal that held the power of the Seven Great Youma was empowered by the very presence of Metallia herself and began to hum and drone with a terrible power that would draw to it the remaining five.

\-------

_Hikawa Shrine:_

She had been on the Moon and seen the broken bones of her dead body, as she had been once. The shining angel of fire and seer-status from old Barsoom. It was a sight to chill the bones and she would have looked forward even to her grandfather's lecherous foolishness as an amusing distraction. Yet she saw something very strange that troubled her. There was a glow emanating from him, a phosphoresence that was kaleidoscopic in nature, and he staggered like the creatures from that one black and white American film she'd seen as a kid that gave her nightmares. 

"Grandfather?" She said wonderingly.

She was tired, deeply tired, from her trip to the moon and decided that it had been a dream from too much stress and too much of the strange golden palace filled with the bleached bones of the dead, and fell into a deep dreamless sleep.

When she awoke the next morning her grandfather was still gone, and the news listed him along with six other people as having vanished in a strange night where five people with an odd glow had staggered into the unknown, no trace of them known.


	11. Memories and the Seven Great Youma:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beryl reflects on her first meeting with Metallia. 
> 
> With the seven hosts of the Seven Youma gathered, Zoisite and Kunzite prepare a new ritual. 
> 
> Haruka and Michiru first adjust to being roommates.

_D Point, Beryl's Throneroom:_

The orb was silent, and Beryl was reflective. It had been a long time since the Silver Millennium had fallen and with it the last traces of the old Lunar Kingdom. A long time since she, desperate for love and affection had sought new power. She seldom spent time reflecting on consequences, as she quietly supervised from her throneroom Thetis and the DD Girls preparing for an unlikely contingency. If her last Shitennou died, the Senshi would come here. A mirror of an old clash, the Light coming to the Darkness instead of the reverse, and yet the impressions from her Orb were so strong that she could not ignore them. If she had sent the Girls with the Generals then there would be no Senshi. That was clear, in retrospect. They would have died and then she would have attained Metallia's goal. 

She sat and she felt the energies harvested, the power of the rite to bind the Seven Oni into their hosts. These were more than Dark Kingdom Youma, they were the old Oni of old Japan, the _first_ Japan, where the Ainu had lived when the entire archipelago was theirs. The Ainu did not use the word to refer to these beasts but where she had learned Japanese she had not learned Ainu and had no such interest in the terms of a primitive and dying culture for its own demons. A great gamble, this. Bind seven demonically enhanced Youma into human hosts, and then send them all against the Senshi.

She had spoken just a few minutes ago to Kunzite, with Metallia's voice. Given him the order to entrust Zoisite to fight, to let him fight alone, and to wield his seven Youma. Kunzite was not pleased and he looked worried, but she had prevailed and that was that.

She was seated on her throne with her fingers steepled. Her eyes closed as she let herself remember that first meeting from which all else had changed.

_She had come here after hearing a voice calling her name, one low and menacing, tectonic syllables spoken by no human mouth warping the air with the very weight of its presence._

_She was platinum blonde with a long flowing green dress, and she had come here. Come here to a seeming mountain in an otherwise normal plain, a mountain that was oddly pers-fire crackled around the mountain in weaving symbolism akin to a field of magma in a volcanic eruption, and what had seemed to be a protrusion of rock with a strangely looping edge saw red hair light into a molten magma that matched the color of its eyes. It oozed malice, and she was no longer excited to recognize the nature of what had spoken to her and shown her her new artes. Molten eyes turned to her and the beast smiled._

_**You are the sorceress?** _

_Her question was a slap into the face of a world that would come to know her name with fear, the grass burning where her knees and the clenched fist of her left hand, extended in a strangely simian kind of posture struck it._

_"I am." she said proudly, trying not to show fear before a living mountain with eyes of magma._

_**You will become a queen, Beryl. A Queen of a new kingdom to supplant that of the shining fools on the Moon.** _

_The giant rose to her feet and she was a titan who seemed large enough to blot out the sun, a vast scabbard at her side as what had seemed flesh seemed to shimmer to reveal armor of shining obsidian hue. A hand clad in that metal drew out a great sword, one longer than all of the various aircraft of Earth or the Lunar Kingdom, and the blade began to burn with a brilliant heat that left her wailing, blind on her knees._

**_Speak the oath that you have heard, little sorceress._ **

_And so she did. Beryl, sorceress and healer of Earth had died that day, blinded by the heat of a blade, and Beryl, Queen of Metallia's Dark Kingdom, had arisen, dress now blue and a great V-shaped crown extending from her head._

_Her eyes, they too had changed. They had been a soft brown, once. Now they were burning red coals, mirror of the thing that had taken her first sight. She was her agent, now, a Queen of a new Dark Kingdom that would begin to arise._

_She had left, then, and the power that was within her first drew a crowd and with theatrical skill she moved her hands before her as an X shape and then began to give her first of many speeches and sermons that would draw people from the fell light of the Moon into the new glories of Chaos._

The Beryl who had been then had loved her Prince, and had seen the mannish and cold Princess of the Moon with her breeches and her sword of oaths as a monster spawned of a monster. Cauldron-born indeed, that was the kind of phrasing suited to a kingdom darker than her own. The Beryl who was here now admittedly did wish to see Endymion again. She would tear out his heart and show it to him and feast upon it and his blood, marking the line between her lifetimes. Chaos was her love, now, her great shield and her sword. It had nourished her and strengthened her.

Only one thing troubled her. The revival of the Senshi meant that the attempts to harvest energy for Queen Metallia's return was repeatedly failing or being reversed. Yet the Queen within the Sun was not weakened nor slowed by this, but instead the Sun's gaze toward the Earth had begun to seem a gaze indeed. Humanity in its feeble multitudes was conscious of being _watched_ but where Metallia and her Dark Kingdom knew that gaze as a blessing, the majestic force of Chaos itself made manifest, humanity was _afraid._ Truly did they need a firm hand to control them.

Only one thing puzzled her. Her orb had shown her the Princess and the wielder of the Silver Crystal when she'd asked. She knew that Uranus was dead and beyond recovery, slain by Metallia herself at the end of the fall of the Silver Millennium. Yet the Princess she saw with her white hair and that sword seemed to have more than a few traces of it. Had the little bird burst her cage after all and replaced the gilded prisons of the Silver Kingdom with the freedom of her guardian of the Seven Winds? She seemed much more masculine than ever, a rebel in her own right. Some part of the Beryl who had been, a tiny, tiny remnant smothered in the sheer malice and hatred of life empowered by Chaos wondered if things had been different, if she had truly found a means to speak to the Princess.....

A face smiled at her within her eyes, one of dark indigo with a red slash of a mouth.

**_You can never go back, little Queen. You have become mine now, and so always shall you be._ **

\--------

_Dark Kingdom Base:_

Kunzite was troubled, and it showed in the way he licked his lips and cracked his knuckles. He cursed the sheer power of the Crystal within and in a low rumbling half-whisper without, and Zoi merely looked at him and laughed, merrily. 

"You give me too little credit, koibito."

The seven beings sleeping in their coffins held their seven crystals, gleaming with a kaleidoscopic light.

"I do not," sighed Kunzite. "You do not realize what you face. The Princess has the Crystal. The Princess is an unholy hybrid of Moon Royal Family power and the destructive raw force of the Outer Senshi. She wields something that is not quite the old Space Sword, but can still call upon its powers. I believe her sword, Kusanagi...."

Zoisite looked up at him as his Black Crystal pulsed, the ritual now ready for completion at any time he wished.

"I believe that the Moon Princess's blade and the Space Sword are now one. You do not know what you will face, and I cannot help you. I don't want to lose you, Zoi. We've lost everything else. We've lost our kingdom, lost the old Lunar realm. We're stuck in this hellscape of a war, and it's just you and me."

There were tears in his eyes and he cursed his weakness inwardly, knowing the monster in the Sun would draw satisfaction.

"Please Zoi, listen to me. Send the Youma, but do not go with them. Let us fight together. And die together, if needs be."

Zoisite shook his head.

"No, koibito, I won't die. The Seven Oni will defeat the Senshi,"

He smiled at him softly.

"Now let us begin."

They held hands, not as lovers, but as those who called upon the Dark Power that Queen Metallia embodied. Words were spoken, antisounds old before the Soul-Harvester began her Long War, and the Black Crystal sent out rays. The Rainbow Crystals were drawn from the Seven, and seven entitites took their place. The first was a thing like a great bipedal cat with a long mane, its fangs gnashing. The second was a metallic being with long blades and a partial set of wings extending from its head like a Swiss army knife come to life. The next was a light green woman clad in what seemed to be a modified gym outfit with long pink thigh highs and a punk haircut extending over one eye, the rest of her head bald. The next was a strangely colored equivalent of, to their eyes, nothing so much as the Hawkmen of that old comic strip they'd seen when studying their english with boxing gloves instead of hands. Then there was a creature like a flayed hide with metallic portions attached that gave its face the shape of a skull. Then an angelic-seeming figure with two blades extending from her chest. And last, the towering creature that had changed least in Chaos influence, the Oni that was still much as it had been.

The Seven Oni were ready.

They waited for a day to recuperate from the strain of releasing such energy, and then they used a scrying orb of their own to see where to attack next.

"The...Hikawa shrine," Zoisite smiled. It was the last time Kunzite would see him smile when alive, and the kiss that followed would be the last kiss they would share. And yet, for all that he could not fight, he would follow, and he would watch, hoping that foreboding that was rising in him would prove wrong.

\--------

_Guest Room, Tenoh House:_

Kaioh Michiru bowed before the stern blond face of Tenoh Isoroku, her beloved's father. 

"Thank you, Tenoh-kun. You have given me a place to stay."

Tenoh-Kun's gaze was wary, somewhat distrustful.

"From what my daughter says you were attacked by those monsters. They do not come around my house, for whatever reason, so you and I and all of us are safe. My daughter..." his gaze bored into her own. "She likes women. Do not take advantage of her."

Kaioh deepened her own bow further.

"I would not, Tenoh-kun."

She couldn't resist careful looks at Tenoh Haruka, the now-known-to-them-all Princess. She was not like the Princess she'd remembered in all things, that one had worn refined clothing, even if of a more militarized sort. She had been a careful and refined woman of delicate tastes on the one hand, and a woman who wielded a sword and was frustrated at knowing her Senshi would live for her, fight for her, and die for her.

Tenoh Haruka, she saw swiftly, pretended to be suave and confident, yet there were little tells. The way she was rigid and yet spastic at points, the way she casually wore a vest around a shirt in a fashion that was.....an acquired taste she would have to do much to acquire.

It was the way her right hand quietly knocked against her thighs. Haruka was nervous, and well might she be when her guest stalked her, and whens he'd gone to the Moon and encountered the ghost of her first and original mother in the literal bones of the Kingdom. Michiru was still more than slightly haunted at her own corpse in her past life holding onto Haruka's. She knew what she felt for Haruka, and it didn't matter if it was some long-dead Guardian of a dead kingdom that felt it. That one had fallen in love with a Princess who loved her as a woman of mystery and deadly destructive power, a refined and beautiful artist and seer.

She had loved her because of the taboo nature of the thing, of the way in which the light of the Moon and the distant protective power of Neptune coincided and worked together. She had loved the Princess because who would not? Such a being was more nearly Goddess than woman, and that one had given her attention and focus and made her realize she was more than a weapon, she was a person, loved, valuable. Meaningful.

None of this drew her to Tenoh Haruka. What had done that was her sense of freedom, of being a wind that could not be caught. It was the effortless power of her body, already then near-superhuman and now truly so. It was not yet her skills with the piano, for she had not yet seen nor encountered that part of her Haruka. It was the way in which Haruka blended a tender heart that was in its own sense as kind and loving and free with that kindness and lovingness as Tsukino Usagi (and there they were both truly sisters in spirit, if not yet beyond other aspects of who they were, and what they were). There was a light there, and it was not Neptune and her doomed love for a Goddess, the Cauldron-Born Princess that would shape her actions.

Nor the new Neptune, the deadly and somewhat grim soldier of the Seas.

It was Kaioh Michiru, and in truth it was that her family had rejected her for being lesbian and cast her out of their lives altogether. To them, Kaioh Michiru was dead and while they did not take away her money, it was all they left her. The Moon gave and the Moon took away, and in this sense, the Moon had given her heart and had destroyed any ties with her family.

It would take time, she knew, to earn the trust of Tenoh-kun, but earn it she would.

They spent time that night talking with Luna, deciphering what it was and what it meant.

Luna had expected to upbraid her Princess for her seeming casualness about her appearance, but she had looked more closely. There were no mirrors and it seemed almost that the Princess had a kind of shame or worry about her body. In the past the old Princess Serenity had been utterly nonchalant about things, accustomed to taking her beauty and her femininity for granted.

Now Tenoh Haruka's hair was longer, and she looked more carefully. Things had changed much between lifetimes, and she would want to learn and to study more about this person who wasn't merely the first of the Senshi to awaken with those mysterious elements that seemed to blend the Seven Winds and the power of the Moon, but was her Princess reborn and reshaped with new powers and a new life. She knew of the old relationship between the Princess and the Outer Senshi.

In truth, meeting one of these semi-legendary figures in the flesh had been a humbling and awe-inspiring moment. The Inners were never taken for granted, and they were never weak, but they were a team, meant to be bodyguards and soldiers alike, and with their interwoven set of relationships with each other, as with Zoisite and Kunzite among the Shitennou. The Outers guarded the entire Solar System, and she had felt _power_ in the gaze of Neptune, a being that had seemed more in truth a machine of war than a human, or once human.

It had made her sad to see Neptune reacting to love and affection and being courted by the Princess with simple incomprehension,as if she was not worthy of these concepts, or blocked from understanding them. In truth it had made her quietly doubt the wisdom of the Silver Millennium and while traumatized by the fall of a world she remembered more than anyone bar perhaps Venus and Neptune, that did not hide the confusion and sorrow at realizing that this was what Queen Serenity's great kingdom had made. Beings of fabulous power that were weapons with voices, incapable and unwilling to see herself as more.

The Princess had remade her as a woman and given her the chances to do such little things as to say no and let her keep to it without fear of punishment.

Neptune had been a strange creature then, superhuman, but inhuman.

Kaioh Michiru was all too human, and in that there was a hidden part of Luna's heart that felt a strong relief. There, at least, it seemed as if the Crystal truly did have a will beyond merely those of its wielders.

She could see the love in Kaioh's eyes.....and she could tell from the little twitches of Haruka's hands and the ways she clenched them that the Princess had more feelings than she let herself feel.

This had lasted for a couple of nights and a new routine in school of Tenoh and Kaioh walking to school together and dazzling people with their combined beauty, when a sudden and powerful _pulse_ of darkness led them to draw their henshins and to quite literally fly to the Hikawa Shrine, and to a fateful confrontation where a Senshi of Fire awoke, and destiny's cruel will took another sharp turn. 


	12. The Eyes of the Sun and the Seven Oni:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the Sun Metallia sits on a great silver throne and observes her servants and her enemies fighting. 
> 
> Zoisite leads the Seven Oni to the Hikawa Shrine to face down the Senshi in a fateful clash.

_The Silver Throne, heart of the Sun:_

Once, she had been one among many beings like her. Beings that still existed in another plane, detached from Midgard and its worries. She had come here, along with a being of Niflheim and its endless cold. Nehellenia she called herself, like the Sea-Goddess. Two Jotnar, an embassy of peace to the Moon Queen and her Empire. Two beings of realms diametrically opposed whose clashes had forged the very heart of starlight, at one remove, and brought all that would be into existence. It was one of many truths and many backdrops to existence.

To the brilliant shining Queen Serenity they were monsters, they they had never not been monsters. Abominations, things of magical power great and terrible and unlike the heart of all that is or its dreadful thing that squatted in its heart. She had not welcomed them but she had not sent them away either.

And then _she_ had come, the Golden Queen, to speak to them. And then the _change._ Once she was a being of black magma and molten veins that formed something both skin and armor, a destroyer built to fight and overcome Gods (and so with the Dark Kingdom as her armies she had thought she had). Now she was indigo, and from solidity that was permanent had become something worse and incoherent, a thing only partially present in the material planes. She had been a giant the size of a mountain at full height, and now she could span the horizon and her blade had fantastically grown with her.

Now she sat on a Silver Throne in the heart of Sol, seeing all and knowing all. She had seen the re-evolution of humans from apes in the wake of the fall of the Silver Millennium, seen the shambling things lose their fur and turn grunts and roars and pants into speech. Had seen them work stone and then wood and then the atom and take their first steps to the stars, to the stars and to the vast and terrifying palace on the Moon, scene of her greatest works.

Once she had brought the Moon Kingdom down, fulfilling the curse of the Frost-Giant turned Nightmare Queen. Now she was here, in the Sun, watching. Light had returned to an Earth cold and unfeeling and severed from magic. The magic was coming back, and yet....

**_As the Wizards return, so return the dragons._ **

Her fingers were steepled. She had seen Youma, tiny fractions of the forces that had stormed the palace and the nine worlds of the Senshi (and oh how proud had she been of that. Her King was fated to burn Nine Worlds and so had she, nine worlds of beings as mighty as the warlike Aesir and the decadent incestuous Vanir!). She had seen Youma destroyed by Senshi magic, she had seen the strange mannish princess resurrected and now haunted by a secret like a fracture in her heart. She saw the regrets of Beryl and her belief that these sacrifices were necessary to bring her to Earth.

No. With them the Dark Kingdom confirmed their Fallen status, and remained so. No longer humans, but beasts. No longer Lunarians, but twisted and deformed things mutated by the power that had changed her. Chaos in her veins, and now instead of nine worlds there was one. Nuclear weapons were known to the old Silver Kingdom too, they had been tried against the Moon Queen that preceded Serenity. Tried, the operative word. Like a lance of fire it had risen and bloomed in fire and howling wind, and then nothing. Failure.

On a silver throne she sat and watched, seeing the proud heart of Zoisite and the deep wariness and sorrow in Kunzite. Arrogant beasts, these. Given strict demands and they could not follow them.

Dragons were returning with the magic, and from the Sun a Dragon moved on her Silver Throne.

_Two miles from the Hikawa Shrine:_

The Sun seemed to pulse instantaneously, in a fashion true astronomy did not say was possible. A single sharp blast of fire fell from Heaven like the wrath of God himself and from a certain perspective so was it. The fire slashed into Kunzite, who groaned and fell into a deep sleep, and it burned and blackened where it fell, melting cars and buildings. People would run, then, and leave him be as he remained. 

With the Seven Great Youma at his side, Zoisite strode forward, confidently. The Princess and Sailors Moon, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Tuxedo Mask would be waiting yet the Inners were not complete. Mars had not yet awoken.

_Outskirts of the Hikawa Shrine:_

Seven Youma led by a General of the Dark Kingdom whose hands were those of Ice and Fire, a mirror unknowing of the primordial Powers that had brought down the world he had known marched, the Oni JiJi at the van behind him. Seven Youma, and a General of the Dark Kingdom, against five Senshi and the strange being with the glowing sword that insisted on fighting with them, the obscenity wearing the face of his former lord. Fire had fallen from Heaven, Metallia's blessing for this march. 

_Through the Eyes of Fire:_

Hino Rei knelt by the fire. Even now the shadow was marching toward her as she had seen. The greatest of the shadows was the lumbering semi-simian thing with a dark blue body and a reddish lion-like head. The creature that was her grandfather, transformed and rewritten into something he never was. This was why he had not returned, this was why the loneliness crowding her since the visions had deepened. Now there were six beings of the Hallowed Ones before her, the Senshi and the Princess and the Prince, the latter two drawing two blades and standing beside each other, now seven with the arrival of Sailor Neptune and the sea-salt air that she brought with her. 

Her arrival gave the monsters pause, and then she saw something that made her wonder if she was dreaming. A white cat walked toward her with a gleaming sigil on his forehead and an object in his hand. The object burned with heat like her fires and the Miko stared at it. There was belonging here, there was a calling as mighty as hers as a Miko, who appeased the Kami, all of them. The kindly ones like Amaterasu, Guardian of the Yamato. The oafish ones like Susanoo her brother, Storm-God and wrathful and spiteful. And the monsters like the Queen of the Graveyard and the August Darkling Star.

The fire called to her, and then she could hear the words of Zoisite.

"Well then, little Senshi, you have dealt effectively with lesser servants of our Dark Kingdom. Now you deal with the seven greatest warriors of our army, all together. And you deal with me! Zoisite, Heavenly King of the North, whose power is Ice and Fire, the primordial forces of creation! Ice it was that covered the depths of Existence, and it was Fire that met that ice and revealed the heart of all that is, from which rose Magic! You are servants of weak and foolish things, and I am a servant of the Queen in the Sun, whose fire burned your world to ashes once!"

He had made a dramatic move she did not see, as she reached for the Henshin determined. This Zoisite had mutated her grandfather and corrupted his soul. He would burn for that. They would _all_ burn for that.

"Now, Senshi, and all the Earth! Come here you heavens to hear and heed you people! I am Fire and I am Ice, and by my will the Seven Oni shall kill you all and dance atop your bones!"

The Oni roared in seven voices, the cat and the the dancer at the highest, the Oni and the flayed-hide with metal one the lowest.

The Oni roared and she took the Henshin, and then light blazed from the Hikawa shrine.

_Mars Crystal Power Make-up!_

Her transformation was strange, it seemed as if she was stripped to purity, wearing nothing to veil her body before the eyes of an ancient entity and its kindred, and then armor formed around her. She was Mars, she was Fire and she was war. She was red fury and the purity and carnage of slaughter and of purification of the lost and the damned. 

With eyes of fire and wings to match, summoned briefly in a shadow of her future self, Mars levitated from the shrine, and joined the other Senshi, and the vast cloud of shards of ice summoned became steam when she summoned a field of fire to repel it, her eyes blazing coals of righteous fury.

_I am the Pretty Sailor who fights for Love and for Passion. I am Sailor Mars! In the Name of Mars, I'll chastise you!_

Again the Oni roared and now as Zoisite recoiled, they charged. They were already outnumbered, yet the stronger ones held back, letting the cat and the the Yoga Youma charge first. 

Bakene leaped with super-strong limbs, leaping straight for the woman in the fuku of dark blue, a blazing sword, once a Talisman and now more than that gleaming with lunar light. The creature's claws shone with eldritch light, as Rikoukeidar moved with a dancer's grace, sweeping beneath the blade of Venus, sauntering toward the entity with wings of fire and eyes to match.

"Mars, is it? He was a God of War. You? You're nothing but a girl in a silly uniform."

Bakene howled when the light of the Lunar sword slammed into its flesh, and dropped, wailing and hissing, steam rising from his flesh. Over him stood the Princess of the Moon, blade held in her right hand.

_Moon Healing Escalation._

A flash of light and then a cat, Rhett Butler, sat and licked itself where there had been a monster. This was the strangest day he'd ever had and frankly, my dear, he didn't give a damn to be a part of it any more. As the dancer cackled and then lanced out only to hear _Akuryo Taisan_ spoken in a cold voice for a blaze of hallowed fire, the Youma just stared stupidly and then Reika Nishimura stood before Sailor Mars, seeing a woman clad in strange armor akin to a Fuku that crackled with mystic might. She did not have eyes. She had coals of fire and that followed by the outraged shout of the angelic Veena led to her shrieking in sudden fear and confusion and running. 

She scooped up Rhett Butler who was too terrified to scratch (then) and then Veena strode sauntering with a cruel grin.

_Now you shall die, Senshi. Dead by dawn!_

She drew the outline of a boulder in the air with a brush she extracted from her chest. The boulder fell toward the Senshi but a blast of Jupiter's lightning hurled outward and smote it to ash. 

The Youma smiled and then drew more boulders, drawing the focus of the Senshi on dissipating them, her brush gesturing as she strode past them to the one Senshi that did not attack and stood before the prince and the princess.

_Now you're an interesting one and no mistake._

Veena had seemed angelic until she smiled.

_Don't worry, coward, when I show you the heart of your Princess I'm sure you'll find it in-_

_Deep Submerge._

Suddenly a tsunami of power collided with her and the air took on a salty tinge that made the Youma howl in pain, all of them, and brought smoke to the body of Zoisite, who stared in confusion. The blast was of such power that it hurled her back bodily through the Senshi, Neptune giving her a mocking salute with her mirror, as her boulders vanished. 

Now came the second flier, Boxy, who sneered and lunged straight for the Princess.

She willingly flew up toward him as well, and then there was a flash of light. _Moon Healing Escalation._

A priest of the Catholic Church howled when he was on the ground and skinned his knees and his ankles and was grateful he hadn't broken anything. Before him there were people who oozed real magick, not the cantrips of mumbling sorcerers who perceived an immaterial realm. Their presence was soothing. The blue-bodied red-maned beast that beat its chest like a gorilla and roared, and the other three monsters, an angelic one rising with its jaw visibly hanging from its face and horrific burns in its body and something of the person within shining convinced him it was time to crawl away. 

Now he knew the Senshi not only were real, as the airport battle showed, but that their power was too. He did not know how to reconcile that with the Catholic faith he held but no matter, he had to run from monsters.

The remaining four Youma, seeing that limited attacks did not work lunged as one, amplified by shards of Ice that Mars's fires dissolved. Seeing this Mercury at last formed her fog, Mars amazed at how clear her vision was and at the howls of confusion from all save the angelic Veena.

It was Gamecen who moved first, lunging straight for Sailor Jupiter, levitating with a body crackling with electric might.

 _I don't think so,_ Jupiter grinned with a cocky smile. _Jupiter Thunderbolt._

Stormclouds grew over Tokyo and in the barometric pressure-change Kunzite's unconscious form began to twitch. 

The bolt of thunder struck Gamecen, who fell to his knees roaring in pain, as Mars's _Akuryo Taisan!_ slammed into Veena, who fell with mute sorrow, tears flowing from her eyes.

A sudden light came and he saw a beautiful woman with long pigtails, holding a henshin in front of her face.

 _Moon Healing Escalation._ The younger daughter of the Moon left Crane Game Joe staring stupidly at the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She seemed in her eternal twenties, eyes of shining warmth and love and compassion and he felt he could drown in them. He remained on his knees until a roaring creature with long blades for arms ran through the thick fog and then he shrieked like a girl and ran, Mars' fire blazing in the fog and denying the attempts of Zoisite's ice to strike through it.

Veena, horribly damaged by the strike from Neptune and then with third-degree burns covering her from Mars' attack found herself staring at a very tall woman with long white hair down to her shoulder. She was clad in that dark blue fuku, and her eyes were stormy and yet there was a rough kindness in them.

"I'm sorry," the angel, the true angel, said, "You should not have been put through this."

Light shone and then _Moon Healing Escalation_ from two voices, as Sailor Moon nodded to her older sister sister, Jiji even then in the midst of a brutal fight with Tuxedo Kamen, whose magical blade took a slow but steady call on his powers.

Yumine Yumino saw in the midst of the fog two angels, one taller and one shorter. Both with white hair that was long, one immensely moreso than the other. On her knees with the image of angels in the fog, it was this that would lead to the start of her own rise as an artist and her competition with Kaiou Michiru, with a painting of two armored angels in fog with eyes that shone with endless warmth, and streaks of magical light through it. Alone among those who had been transformed she did not run, but walked in a trance to her studio, and sat, and began to paint as the spark of inspiration grew.

From seven, now there were two.

Bunbo had taken multiple attacks from the Senshi, but he and Jiji were the greatest of the Youma. The blasts that had done such great damage to his lesser kindred slammed into him and at most dealt scorch marks and rust on the metal with no more visible effects. His blades had slammed into Mercury in a lucky strike and brought her down before Sailor Jupiter, who stared in mute dismay, then as he knelt and prepared to strike with the blade a _Jupiter Thunderbolt_ and _Akuryo Taisan!_ struck him and threw off his aim, Mercury rolling away.

It was Venus who moved toward him then, a sudden and swift motion with her blade held out in a posture to strike toward the monster, who opened his arms wide. He had taken strikes from all of the Senshi save the Prince and the Princess, and expected no harm from Venus's blade. Yet Venus was cousin to the moon lineage and her weapons, too, could purify as theirs did and her blade, the sigil of her office burned with a hallowed light. When it slammed clean through his metal Bunbo stared at her in mute confusion.

He was impaled, and bloody oil ran from teeth that materialized in his mouth, sharp things of iron, running down his jaw.

 _Too strong for you,_ he rasped in a guttural voice.

Venus could not remove her blade, even as the purification went further to work, and then a sudden column of fire hurled straight for her, fired by Zoisite, whose range of vision was now free. It was followed by a second aimed at the dizzy Sailor Mercury, only for Sailor Moon to stand before them and unleash a sudden dome of light that collided with the fire and stalemated it at first, and then the fire dissipated in an ugly green crackle that left winces on the faces of all the Senshi.

Zoisite was furious now and began to summon ice and fire in progressively greater fashions, yet a now-recovered Mercury negated the ice, and Mars the fire, as Venus finally withdrew her blade. Together the two beings of the Moon raised a Henshin and a blade and in a flash of light the staggering Bunbo became Uwara Ryo, who stared at Sailor Mercury wide-eyed as she pushed him aside from a moving fist of the wrathful JiJi, groaning in pain as she fell forward again.

Freed of the stress of trying to direct forces that would not listen anyway, JiJi moved with similar force, hurling aside Venus in the midst of one of her swings, Mars flying up to catch her.

Multiple thunderbolts from Jupiter and three Deep Submerges from Neptune and a truthful stab from Tuxedo Kamen's blade finally slowed him, Mercury and Venus wavering at an edge of consciousness from the impacts.

Mars placed Venus down gently, and then strode with her eyes of fire to the vast and monstrous-seeming Oni.

"Grandfather," her voice was timid, at an edge of breaking. This was the only man who'd ever truly been a father to her, the only man she'd loved and trusted in her life. Yuuichiro had searched for her grandfather after his disappearance, and they were friends, but it was impersonal. He was a colleague at work, this?

The monster with its hands spread wide and green blood from a wound in its side looked at her.

For a moment she had hope that the being recognized her.

"Grandfather, please. Stop this. You're Grandpa Hino, the only one in my family who loved me!"

The Oni looked at her for a moment and the hope grew. Then the creature's backhand lanced out and hurled Mars against a telephone pole, knocking her unconscious and it loped forward in a simian-like set of motions for the Princess, who had heard the words.

"No," she growled, a sound worthy of the Serenity who had been.

 _Moon Healing Escalation_ collided into a being that was lunging straight for her, only to find Grandpa Hino straddling her, staring at him bemusedly.

"Well when I wanted to be on top of a pretty girl, this wasn't _quite_ what I meant," mused Grandpa Hino in a dazed fashion. Then it occured to him just who he was straddling.

"Oh, it's you! My apologies, miss, even if I must say you are quite a sight for these old eyes," and then Grandpa Hino walked in a stately fashion to the shrine.

The groans of a woman with long black hair caught his attention and he looked to her. For a moment her eyes of fire subsided and Grandpa Hino was frozen. She looked an awful lot like his Rei, and then the man with disturbed hair and frenzied laughter and terrible light shining in his eyes summoned a wall of ice-shards in one hand and a vast wall of flame with the other and all of a sudden the shrine and its holy ground seemed safer than whatever was going on here.

It was Tuxedo Kamen with his blade out who walked, even as the two Lunar royals dispelled the ice and fire with a joint wall of Lunar energy, his eyes on the madly giggling and weeping Zoisite.

"My general, do you not remember me?"

 ** _Endymion is dead!_** The creature in him roared, and he stared at a being that wasn't his former lord, it couldn't have been, and then the look of sorrow on his face made it clear.

And the demonic wrath in Zoisite faded, as Sailor Serenity walked toward him, standing beside his lord.

When last he had seen them, it was on Beryl's blade of magic that both had been impaled, Serenity shielding her bleeding younger sister with her own body, and Sailor Moon howling in anguish at the sight. They were not dead, yet, though the wound was fatal, and Serenity not yet injured. Then, as now, the scales had fallen from his eyes and then, as now, he looked at a Senshi with anguish in them and a plea for mercy, to die as himself. Then it was Sailor Neptune, who had worked herself back to standing with a gaping hole in her chest, and who raised her talisman with a shaking hand.

Now it was Serenity, a blade like her old Kusanagi shining with a hallowed light in her hand.

"Let me die as myself," he gasped. "And tell Kunzite I loved him."

Serenity had a look of sorrow on her face. "I will. And I will destroy the one who did this to you."

Zoisite only laughed sadly and then in a flash of light and words of power his body disintegrated in green ash.

Then they heard a howl of anger and grief and anguish, and walls of Dark Energy slammed into them all, hurling them backward.

"Zoisite, Koitbito! NO!"

Kunzite, the last of the four Heavenly Kings stood at the ash, beneath which was a disk, and grabbed it, tears rolling down his face.

"You killed him, monsters!"

"No," said Sailor Serenity. "We saved him. His last words were that he loved you."

"YOU KILLED HIM!"

He hurled a blast straight for Sailor Serenity, whose crystal twinkled like a star and there was a reeking cloud of smoke.

Grief in his heart, Kunzite staggered away, moving as if he was more than half-drunk.

When he returned to the base he spent three days weeping and destroying everything he could strike with the blasts, and then he sunk into a command throne the mirror of Beryl's in D-Point. Shadows seemed to crawl into his eyes as he wept tears of utter darkness.

"Zoi," he groaned. "I will avenge you. No more games. I will kill them all."

The Sun's rays began to shine on that fourth day, and in that shining he heard a mocking low laughter, the peals of the Sun-demon to whom they had sold their very souls. He did not care. Let Metallia laugh, he would raise his own Youma, the last before the DD Girls.

He would draw out the Senshi, and instead of Zoisite's hubris, and his speech, he would simply attack them. That Princess who had spoken those words and halted his blasts, he would take her head this time.

His teeth were bared in a snarl that was more the voice of a wounded animal than a man, and darkness crawled around him and embraced him.

The last of Four Lords of a Kingdom, the last of the martyrs outside D-Point itself glared at the heavens and the mocking laughter of the Sun.

"I'll kill them, Metallia, and then I'm coming for you."

_The Heart of the Sun:_

On a Silver Throne there sat a dragon in indigo with a terrible slash of a grin that curved with wicked fangs. Her eyes shone with a hell-light, as she heard the words of Kunzite maddened by grief and the loss of what he'd had and had had so painstakingly since the rising of the Senshi. 

**_Soon,_** she spoke and the Sunlight seemed to echo her words.

_**Soon in ice as it was at the dawn, the fires of World-Destruction shall melt Ginunngagap and I shall face Serenity. Face to face, no armies. Just myself and the Princess, and she shall die in fire instead of blade of treachery.** _

_**Soon.** _

Madness stalked the world as it seemed that the Sun brooded and _watched_ and animals began to try to hide in their lairs from its baleful gaze. 


	13. "For three things shall I condemn  Egypt, for four shall I abjure it!"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At D-Point Queen Beryl's fortifications are at last complete. 
> 
> During the four days of Kunzite's grief, the Senshi extend and form cautious new friendships.

_In the immediate aftermath of the first battle near the Hikawa Shrine:_

Sailor Mars detransformed first, for she knew that fighting here, and with her appearance and her powers that there was no secret to who she was. Not here, not with them. It was not merely trust, but a priestess in the garb of her role and her function who stood before them with dignity, body bruised and a painful wheezing that reflected the agony of the hit, not just physically but emotionally. Yet with careful honing from her duties she spoke without that agony visible in her speech, even as her ribs squeezed and cut. 

"This is holy ground, and you have fought for it, at the risk of the last full measure. You are welcome."

In an inversion of how it would be in so many other times, though not all of them, it was the Senshi and Tuxedo Kamen who entered the ground and bowed before the spirit of the Kami in the shrine, honoring the God, and then it was not adults grown to strong manhood and beautiful womanhood, but children. Of them the last to enter was Tenoh Haruka, who had been Sailor Serenity, as she had finally decided to call herself. She was not Uranus, though she had inherited a modified variant of her talisman. And she was not the Princess, for what was a Princess without a kingdom? There was no kingdom, only bleached bones in a palace inhabited by a ghost.

Her eyes followed the clear pain in the walk of Hino Rei, and of Aino Minako, and of Mizuno. Guilt flooded her, guilt and fear.

Because she held the soul of an ancient immortal sorceress and "the power of a God, to restore life, if all else has taken it" she had transformed _children,_ even herself, into these immortal women who stood against a terrible monster. No-one could be worth this, but she certainly wasn't. The guilt flooded her like the power of Neptune's magic, and the Senshi of the Sea in her form as Kaioh Michiru paused and went back to her, seeming to know what feelings were in her heart. No words were spoken, all that was done was her picking up one of Haruka's hands and stroking it.

"I like your hands, Tenoh-san," she spoke quietly.

"Haruka," Haruka said, quietly.

Kaioh Michiru paused. "Call me Haruka. No honorifics. With what we do, with what lies behind all this...." she smiled sadly. "Just call me Haruka."

The smile on Kaioh Michiru's face was small and it was gentle, and it ignited feelings in Tenoh Haruka that she was wary to let speak too far, and she simply took a deep breath and strode onward.

Into the shrine they went, and they sat down, Michiru by her side, Tsukino and Chiba together. From a year apart and that history of bullying there was still that apologetic note in his eye and he stared at her entranced, as if her every motion had captured his heart. The way, when she wasn't careful, that Haruka found herself watching Michiru so closely, every bit of grace in her, in this small and deceptively fragile woman who carried the cold and cruel and awe-inspiringly devastating magic of the sea itself.

Mizuno and Kino sat together too, Mizuno groaning, wanting to curl up but it hurt too much. Cautiously, Kaioh squeezed her hand and then went over to Mizuno to kneel beside her.

Tenoh looked up to see the priestess, who had quietly slipped into another room and came back with a look of relief on her face. "Grandfather's OK. He's an old pervert, but he's OK. He's alive. And he's sleeping. Him. Not an Oni that was....."

Her words trailed off.

"I don't know how to thank you, or if i should thank you or that supergirl within you, but..."

Hino bowed deeply, the bow of someone greatly inferior to one greatly superior. "Thank you for saving my grandfather and all those other people. Even that cat."

Tenoh Haruka flushed and couldn't meet her gaze, but accepted the bow with a nod.

\-------

Mizuno let her gaze focus on the strange sea-salt air that surrounded the older girl with aquamarine hair who knelt beside her.

"When you're better," the arch and refined voices of a girl with wealth spoke quietly, "I want to meet you in a pool."

Mizuno raised an eyebrow, a slight flush on her face at the thought of so beautiful a girl as Kaioh Michiru in a bathing suit.

"We're both Sailors of Water," Kaioh's lip quirked slightly. "And I'm going to guess you like to swim as much as I do."

Mizuno nodded, a slight moan of pain from her as her ribs caught for a moment with a motion.

"When you're better, I want to see who's the better swimmer. Water or the Ocean."

"Deal," Mizuno spoke in a soft whisper and then she let herself relax when Tsukino Usagi knelt beside her and a soft glow emanated from her hands, a glow that seemed to accelerate an existing healing. Tsukino would walk among the Senshi during the meeting, saying little and looking with worry.

\--------

"You seem....."

Haruka gulped. Hino was looking at her carefully.

"You seem sad, afraid, even."

Hino was a priestess, and even if she wasn't Catholic, it wasn't......wasn't the worst thing in the world to confess a burden.

"This is the first time we've fought these things and they've hurt us for more than a battle. Kaioh-san and I fell at the last battle but we got up and went back to fighting. Here? You were hurt. Mizuno was hurt. Aino was hurt. I have power, Hino-san, to fight monsters and to heal them and bring them back to what they were. I can do.....a lot of things. I can do them and I make others transform. You, Kaioh-san, Kino-san, Tsukino-san. I can do this, and all of you fight, and risk your lives."

Her eyes were worried as she knew Hino was concealing pain. As her younger sister did, some magick in her responded to that pain and her sword appeared, and she raised the hilt of the blade toward Hino, who gasped as the pain seemed to fade from crippling to manageable. Some part of her told her that within a couple of hours, with her existing healing powers, she would be fine. Haruka placed the blade on a low table near them, letting its power extend out and merge with her....sister's power. The Tsukino and Tenoh clans were not related in this life but the Senshi and Princess of the Moon were sisters by blood, whatever else was so.

"I can do all of this, but what right do I have to take girls and make them into people who fight? It's arrogant, it's wrong, and I am asking people to literally risk their lives to fight monsters."

Her fists clenched and tears grew at the edge of her eyes. "You and Aino and Kino, you were hurt because of me. My awakening brought you to this. You thank me, but I should apologize to you. I've made you into this, and it's just...."

Hino quietly leaned forward, grateful to be able to breathe without pain.

"There are monsters in this world, Tenoh-san. We are the shield and the sword against them. if it was not us, it would be others. and it might be one less kind than you that called us to it. We are soldiers in a war now, all of us, even me. Just recruited but..." her smile was slightly awkward. "I've seen this in the fires. I know what the future holds."

Her gaze froze as _a blade in the arctic from the arm of a blue thing that was like a woman, in part, but oozed the sheer malice of the Great Enemy lanced out and she could see the red and then she fell to her knees, and only a last desperate shout of_ Burning Mandala _ended it._ That was what the future held. Death in the snows and then uncertainty. Death in the snows, and it would not be so long from now. Yet for a brief, so brief, moment she would command her fires to cleanse and burn without, and she would have something she had never had.

In the cautious smile when her eyes met Aino's, and she widened slightly at the more than somewhat surreal sight of a singing sensation of Japan but one who was a growing hit internationally returning her smile like an ordinary person, she reflected. Yes, brief and beautiful, and it would be worth a blade in the belly in the snows.

"And it will be worth it and it is worth it. You give us purpose."

Tenoh's fists clenched and they trembled. "I feel like a monster."

Kaioh returned then, hearing the last conversation and she too remembered what she'd seen in her own mirror. _All but herself and Haruka and Tsukino had fallen. And Tsukino too was hurt, limping, an arm broken. Even Chiba too had fallen, sprawled in the snow where he'd saved Tsukino and the memory of that burned in her gaze. Now the monsters were dead, save the Queen herself and in a blue dress she walked toward them with eyes that flashed with ancient hate._

Ill-met by moonlight, proud Serenity, _spoke the queen of shadows._

_She raised her staff and then Neptune shielded her princess and her fellow Senshi from a blast that speared through her in multiple parts and she sank to her knees, staring into space. She felt Serenity's grief then, and that of Sailor Moon._

_A last word._ "Love." _and darkness rose in infinite whiteness beneath the cold light of the moon. The Moon giveth and the Moon taketh, accursed be the name of the Moon._

Yes, she too knew what awaited them all to the very minute and the hour, and she gave Hino a nod of understanding, and there was a quiet sigh of relief and loneliness dispelled and a part of Michiru's ocean connected to the seer-sight of flame. 

"You aren't a monster, Haruka." Her voice was soft and as melodic as her violin.

"The monster is what awakened us all. You do not carry this burden alone. We will all help you."

Haruka would gladly drown in the ocean of Michiru's voice, soft and beautiful, every syllable enunciated carefully and with the most laser-guided precision.

She could not resist a smile, soft and sad, and let Michiru take their not entirely hidden feelings further.

It had been hard to see Mercury and Venus and Mars hurt. The thought of Neptune bleeding for her, Neptune _dying_ for her.....

Her heart leaped into her chest and for a moment she couldn't breathe and she was crying, and all Kaioh did was lean against her and whisper into her ear soft words.

In quiet talk and healing wounds the girls and the one man took quiet acquaintances formed on the battlefield and little connections were born, the sparks that one day would become a great fire.

That night the spectre she had conjured for herself, the thought of Kaioh Michiru like all the other women fighting for her and _dying_ for her, a sacrifice she would never be worth and that she could never repay, led her to reach to Kaioh and to ask her "Would you like to sleep with me tonight?"

The fight and the realization of what was impending meant the often imperceptible mask of the Kaioh clan failed and there was a bright beaming smile on her face, as moonlight cast on Tenoh Haruka and knew its own.

\-------

_The second day:_

Those who were hurting when they went to bed and concealed that pain awoke pain-free. The miracles of Tsukino and Tenoh had healed them. Kaioh Michiru awoke for the first night in her life in the arms of Haruka, and ironically this time truly did merely sleep with her. It was the most restful night she had ever known, and there were no fearful dreams of a bloody death in snows, or a glimpse of golden armor and a wicked murderer's grin from ear to ear and then a cackle as a blade sliced through her heart and Haruka screamed her name in horror. There was warmth and contentedness. 

The schoolday was a normal one of the usual frustrations and there was comfort in that. The darkness was there but it was quiescent. It was a day for a test in one class for most of them, in three for Kaioh and Tenoh on the same day. It was a day of the usual things of life, including the familiar banter between Gray and Tenoh. Gray Elsa, as Tenoh thought of her in Japanese style, was a transfer student who was the closest one to keeping up to someone in the lower edges of superhuman even before her transformation. A day of normal things, of the little interactions. Tsukino's stinkeye to Umino, who for all that he was a hyperactive person who so strongly reminded her of Mizuno was a good friend of hers.

A day to be with Naru, to remember what it was to be Tsukino Usagi, not this superhuman, not this person haunted by a terrible dream of a sorceress in a blue dress and shielding her older sister and then shadows.

Her smile was effortless and so was her kindness, and alas she'd stepped over her own feet and tripped a few times, but that was the hazards of being herself. She had more friends now, and Kino and Naru, who she had expected to be the furthest apart, soon connected, the two bonding over a love of cooking. Naru too had been lonely, only klutzy Tsukino Usagi, who loved everyone, truly connecting to her. She now met not only (her eyes bugged out at the sight and she wasn't sure for a while yet of what to make of her) Aino Minako, who for a celebrity seemed a ditzy person prone to getting phrases wrong but had a good heart. Mizuno she knew well, but Kino and Aino were new to her, and it gave her contentment.

Kaioh and Tenoh hung out together and with Elsa, Kaioh's loneliness easing. She found that Haruka knew easily how to make friends and to connect to people, her warmth something that they could speak to. The girl kicked out by her family into an empty apartment for being a lesbian and haunted by seer-dreams knew very little of this, and had been starved for it. Haruka could have kept her away, could have had the new transfer student and stalker kept at a distance from her family, and yet Tenoh Haruka welcomed her, made her a part of her circle of friends, even as Elsa in particular couldn't resist an amused smile at the star-struck way that Kaioh looked at her friend.

It felt good, it truly did feel good to live life like this. No monsters in the night, and nothing of the Senshi that led them to meet Hino in the arcade, where Motoki held on fiercely to Reika, whose disappearance had rattled him. He did not know about the monster she had become, though he had heard much from her of the Senshi, the women of magic in their brilliant armor, and what it was that they were, what it was that they could do. As far as he was concerned, they had saved her life, and he couldn't speak warmly enough of them. He did not know that the Senshi were listening.

At one point Haruka went up with Aino and Tsukino to play a game with them, and she was briefly knocked back by a girl a year younger than the Inner Senshi. She was a quiet, pale girl with violet eyes and a bob haircut, and she smiled, giving a soft bow and a near-whisper of "Gomen nasai."

"It's all right."

A sense of strange connection led her to ask: 'What's your name?"

"Tomoe Hotaru."

She smiled softly. "You're Tenoh Haruka the pianist and racer."

Tenoh flushed slightly at the reminder of her own budding fame and bowed, Tomoe laughing and then moving quietly to her own game, which she played alone.

Tenoh's face became a bit sad then. "Poor girl,"

For a moment she put Tomoe Hotaru out of sight and out of mind, thinking she would not mean much to her.

\---------

_The third day:_

_D Point, Arctic:  
_

The DD Girls and Thetis knelt before her. 

"It is done, Great Queen."

Beryl smiled, a carnivore's smile.

"Excellent. Though I hope this is merely a marker of magnificence, and that Kunzite kills these Senshi."

They remained on their knees. "Whatever it is that you will, Queen of the Earth, such has it ever been, so ever shall it be."

Beryl called her staff to her, feeling the rush of her magick, the strength that empowered her.

"I am going to speak to my general."

In a flash of dark energy that crackled like a bolt of lightning she was gone.

_Dark Kingdom Base:_

The base was shadows and a ruin now, dark energy fired around in bolts, the work of a mind of great power and great grief. 

Beryl felt that power, and knew that it was sunk deep into the loss of one who was loved. That had been her once, when Endymion had fallen on the blade of one of the DD Girls, and Metallia had laughed then and told her how futile love was, especially when its guarantee was trusted to the whim of the might and majesty of Chaos.

It was mighty but a small portion of her own, and it had been unpleasant to watch her forces winnowed and failing in the presence of these Senshi. She ached to fight but Metallia did not wish her to do so, and yet even as she heard the sunlight echoing with her laughter, she moved through a place once vibrant and now derelict.

She found a slovenly and stubbled Kunzite on the command throne, eyes marked still with grief and anger.

He saw her then, a Queen of dark power and perfect beauty, her eyes shining a bit with an indigo hue.

"I was there where you were once." Her voice was pensive. "Endymion. I loved him, I truly did."

She looked at the ruin of the base, the last traces of mighty dreams.

"I got over it."

"I don't want to get over it."

"I am not saying that you should. I am saying that if we should be fated to be reborn again, you might not have what you do here."

She knelt beside him, no diminution in her status, for she took dust and blew it into a conjuration of the Senshi in their memory.

"That one," she breathed in excitement. "The Senshi of the Ocean. Neptune."

Kunzite stirred.

"The Princess's little heart." Beryl's face went from a more normal human color to near the hue of bleached bone. "I will find this Neptune, and I will make her one of us."

"Metallia will not let me fight, but she has not forbidden me to corrupt the fighters."

They waited, for a moment. Would fire fall from Heaven? Or laughter in a derisory sense form a chorus of the damned? There was only warmth. The cruel grin widened.

"I will find her."

She set a small trap near a music hall where Kaioh Michiru, the Sailor of the Seas, had revealed her identity. A small trap, a seemingly weak Youma hiding her truth behind an illusion, her staff in her hands.

The Senshi of the Ocean transformed, confident such a being could be well handled by herself.

When she arrived at the place she seemed to freeze in a moment of fear. Then the illusion fell and she realized she was facing the queen in the blue dress.

"Who are you?"

"Beryl, Queen of the Dark Kingdom, slayer of the Lunar Empire."

The woman raised a staff oozing with dark energy.

"And you, little Senshi of the Seas, are to be my new general to replace my three slain ones."

"The Hell I am."

"Hell is what I am, girl," she snarled.

Dark power blazed from her and Kaioh Michiru sought to stand against it as a soldier of light, in the full power of her nature as an Outer Senshi. Yet she faced no mere Youma here but the very Queen who had overcome the power and the destructive force of the shadows.

The Sailor of the Seas knelt, a blank look in her eyes.

Kaioh Michiru was distant to everyone that afternoon, speaking of the successful battle with a minor youma in a detached sense. Her race with Mizuno was a stalemate, Water and Ocean evenly matched, and she was partially spaced out so Mizuno asked her for a rematch she accepted with an almost absent-minded nod of her head.

She remained distant like this through the fourth day, sleeping quietly with Tenoh Haruka even as the power that surged within her wished to work with Kunzite and Beryl's trap.

She dreamed of Princess Serenity's skill in skating, a connection between her and Michiru's own element, at least in part, and the way that the Princess had expressed her desire for motion and to escape her cage.

That day with her voice carefully speaking in its modulated tones that could make a dweller in the Arctic take a big block of its ice, she spoke to Tenoh Haruka and asked her if she knew how to ice-skate.

A wistful tone and memory in her mind, Tenoh said "No, but I would like to try."

Michiru smiled in a strange sense that wasn't quite her smile.

"Good. I'll go with you."

A slight or more than slight warning sounded in Haruka at that smile and the way Michiru's head moved, almost like her neck was broken, and at a slight aura of menace. Her Lunar power surged for a moment and then a deep and boiling anger rose.

She had a bad feeling about this. These enemies, the Dark Kingdom, they had dared to _hurt_ her Michiru. She had a bad feeling about this, that they were wielding Michiru to bait her into a trap, with a date.

Her anger was palpable and Kaioh Michiru would have sensed it. The Dark Kingdom-influenced woman looking at her looked at her with dead eyes, like a doll's eyes, and that same odd smile, and then hugged her.

Tomorrow, Tenoh Haruka vowed, she would spring the trap and she would free her Michiru. Whatever it took. Michiru stepped outside for a moment.

_Dark Kingdom Base;_

Now clean-shaven, Kunzite heard the voice of the newly-captured General speaking to him with a note of resentment in her voice. 

"She's taken the bait......Kunzite. Tomorrow. She will be there at 4 in the afternoon."

He smiled, cruelly.

"Well done, Neptune. You will be rewarded handsomely."

He heard a snarl from her voice and quietly dismissed the communicator, seeing the Youma-seeds in his hand.

Three of them. Three beings on ice, himself, and Sailor Neptune.

All of them against this accursed Princess.

He permitted himself a smile.

"You will be avenged, Zoi-Koibito."

_Hikawa Shrine:_

Only Kaioh Michiru missed that first meeting, and the Senshi did not fail to notice the not so low degree of anger and even wrath boiling within their Princess. It was Tsukino who quietly asked her "What's going on?" only to hear a curt "That's between me and her." 

It was that uncertainty and anger that would lead the Senshi to follow her.

For Chiba Mamoru it was seeing Kaioh Michiru going about a 'normal' day in a kind of detached trance, eyes empty like a doll's eyes, almost dead in her skull.

And so came the fifth day, Chiba Mamoru tailing Kaioh Michiru with a rose in his pocket, and Aino Minako likewise joining him along with Tsukino Usagi. The other Senshi did not show up that day and would deeply regret it.

It began when in a trance of her own Tenoh Haruka laced up ice skates, and found herself skating effortlessly, with more than Olympic skill in a casual sense, staring at herself in complete bemusement. Somehow she was able to do this when she'd never even _seen_ ice skates before.

As she found herself relaxing and contented, she felt a sudden pall of evil and then there he was, Kunzite. In full transformation and dark energy crackling as the skating rink stared at him in horror.

And beside him, as she paled and then looked to Kunzite, who gave her a challenging nod with a feral madness tinged by grief and wrath was Sailor Neptune in full transformation, her oceanic power having a darker edge to it, and yet in her eyes there was desperation, _her_ Michiru trying to fight something within. On her bow there was a symbol. A Beryl stone.

"Beryl." It was not her voice that growled that word, but the voice of someone older and more powerful. Princess Serenity, seeing the challenge and in a flash of light Tenoh Haruka changed as Kunzite bellowed words of power and then there were three Youma of tremendous power, a couple who danced who transformed into an antennaed being, and a horribly bloated thing with forms both cotton and snow-like, and great claws.

Aino Minako and Tuxedo Kamen transformed then, only to find themselves facing a butterfly-like Youma who was hovering over them and waved with a sickly grin and a 'yoo hoo!' as Sailor Venus looked at her with a glare.


	14. 'For Ocean is more ancient than the mountains and freighted with the weight and memories of time'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kunzite had a simple scheme, draw in the Princess of Neptune as a brainwashed weapon to wield against her love, the Princess. 
> 
> As with all simple schemes it begins well and then takes courses only the very wisest could have foreseen.

_Kaioh House, Aoyama Ward, Tokyo, an hour before the Fall of the House of Kaioh:_

The Kaiohs were an ancient and rich family of Japan. They had been among the first Daimyos, fighting on behalf of the House of Yamato in the age before the Shoguns, and then with the honed instincts of trained political figures, finding the winning sides of each aeon, and hitching themselves to them unerringly. They had made but one controversial decision, to openly endorse Nobunaga Oda even after his most infamous deeds, but deft siding with the Tokugawas and then with the Restorationists in the wake of Commodore Perry's steamship in Edo Bay had brought them to where they were. Known as the House of the Ocean, for reasons known only to half-understood statements in the Shinto texts, they were a proud and a revered house.

Kaioh Asagi had that long history solidly in mind as she looked at a painting, the painting of the child who had been sent to live on her own. Her eldest daughter, heir to the family's fortunes (now, only if all of them died). Michiru. A painting, the first. Before those of the endless Void and the broken corpses. Before what she'd termed the Silence. This was a painting that the greatest painters of past and present would have wept with uncomprehending awe to witness, and she'd painted it at the age of five, after horrifying nightmares that saw shrieking screams that woke up the entire family and potentially the neighborhood.

She'd drawn a figure with hair her own color, clad in a strange kind of armor. At one remove it resembled, distantly, a schoolgirls' outfit but it crackled with a mystic potency that made it seem as if it was a figure alive on the page. She wore high-heeled boots that stood on an ocean of blood, her gauntlets likewise either covered in blood or digging into her arms to drip blood. Nine drops from each hand. This strange figure had in one of the bloody hands a strange kind of device akin to a mirror, eyes that gazed with a stoic detachment, and a small curve to her lips that gave the lie to the detachment of her gaze.

A broken hand lingered at one part of the picture and part of a cracked ribcage on the other, and that had been the most disturbing. The hand was her own, and the ribcage that of......

Her eyes flickered past to images of her husband and of her other five children.

Michiru had been troubled. Those strange dreams and fantastic tales of a shining palace on the moon and a beautiful princess with long jackboots, close-cropped white hair, and a bejewled blade had become an obsession in one so young that reflected much greater maturity.

There had never been love lost between the Kaiohs, a staunch clan Yamato even by the standards of old Imperial Japanese Yamato Damashii, and the Ainu merchants of Nagasaki, the Tenoh clan. Yet it was the eldest daughter of that clan, Tenoh Haruka, who had a vast amount of information about her from Michiru, and their daughter's strange absences correlated directly to photographs taken and to other issues.

There were no laws against it, and no love lost, but something about this rubbed them all wrongly. And so there had been words said, harsh words. Michiru had spoken with trembling dreams of 'the voice of Neptune.'

And then the horrifying moment when there was footage of a battle fought at one of Tokyo's airports. One of those seen in the battle was the very thing from Michiru's painting, wielding the mirror, demonstrating vast power.

Five other children, three boys and two girls, and all of them model Kaiohs, model Japanese, blowing with the prevailing winds.

Asagi tapped her chin, staring at the painting. There had been an aura of menace and foreboding, and she did not relish the thought that this had a premonition to it.

_Skating Rink, Tokyo, Fifteen minutes before the Fall of the House of Kaioh:_

Kunzite smiled at the look of outrage on Sailor Serenity's face, as she held her sword before her. She had him before her, three Youma, and Neptune.

Yet where he had expected despair from her, he only saw rage and protective fury on her part, fury aimed seemingly at the works he'd done with and to Neptune, improving her as he had been improved.

He had expected Neptune to give a speech as the Senshi did, but instead she simply gave Serenity an expression that gave her pause. In retrospect, in the remaining minutes of his life as a corrupted being of Chaos, Kunzite would wish that he'd seen that cue for what it was.

When a salt-tinged blast of energy lanced out like a spear and hurled itself into the bloated polar-bear like Youma, which transformed back into a bemused Yamamoto Saeko, who squeaked in fear at the sight of a gleaming being of magic on the one hand and a bemused and horrified figure of darkness on the other, and the strange oceanic tinge to the air, and ran away he began to understand.

 _Neptune, you missed_. He growled.

Neptune only kept that smile on her face and then hurled more such oceanic-tinged spears, and the two dancers he'd transformed reawoke as well, and then one of them ripped clean through his thigh and brought him to the ground, greenish blood splattering on the ice.

He stared stupidly, and so did Serenity.

"You forgot a basic lesson of magic, Kunzite of the Dark Kingdom." It was not the voice of Neptune that the Senshi knew, though had Pluto been one of them then she would have been chilled to hear an old and familiar tone. It was the voice of the old Neptune, the stoic and destructive weapon that barely qualified as a sapient lifeform until she had met her princess and rediscovered humanity in the light of her gaze. It was a voice of cruelty and disdain, of casual supremacy over Youma and the teeming masses of humanity.

"Do not call up that which you cannot put down."

Another lance struck out and his arm flew away and slapped against the back of a skater who screamed like a little girl in spite of being a surprisingly burly man and got out of the rink.

Kunzite's visions wavered and in his last moments Chaos slipped away. It slipped away and he saw Power walking toward him, the deadly force of the Ocean, the quirk of her upper lip transformed into a broader smile.

"The Inners were the guardians of the Princess, so they could afford to shed tears over their enemy and be good people and immortal soldiers all the same. We of the Outers were soldiers through and through, we destroyed armies with waves of our hands. To remove love and mercy from our hearts is not to make a faithful lackey of the demon that squats in the Sun, it is to awaken a monster. You wanted the monster, general of Earth."

She was in front of him now and he was lifted up by one of her hands, the mirror held in another and he could only see the aqua gleam in her eyes.

"Here is the monster," and then the last thoughts of Kunzite were that he had wished only to have seen Zoisite one last time and the hope that if they were resurrected he would remain in love with him. _Deep Submerge_ sounded and then in a flash of oceanic magic he was gone, and a disk collided into the ice.

It was then that a Sailor V with torn bow and skirt and Tuxedo Mask with a cape ripped to shreds and his sleeves and trouser legs torn likewise ran in, only to find Sailor Serenity gazing in mute shock at Neptune, who strode toward her with a gleaming beryl stone on her bow.

Neptune, Fuku still dripping with Kunzite's blood, pulled Sailor Serenity into a sudden and powerful and bruising kiss, and then turned her gaze to the ceiling, where she raised her left hand and a burst of oceanic magic ripped a hole in the ceiling through which she flew with a mocking wave.

_Kaioh Mansion:_

It was a rarity in this family, a dinner where they were all present and a place set even for the one whose name was no longer to be spoken. Or that had been the intent, even as a sudden oceanic aura intruded on the air and there had been a sound of breaking glass. Her husband drew a knife that could qualify as a junior sword, and walked ahead of the family. 

There was the table, seemingly unharmed. And there was the entity from their daughter's painting seated in her seat, what were both gloves and gauntlets on the table, stained with a filthy greenish substance. The oceanic aura was stronger here, so strong they could choke on it. The monster from the painting tapped her fingers against the table, eyes shining with an aqua hue. On her bow there was a detail that was not in the painting, a beryl that seemed to thrum with an energy akin to a singularity, devouring light around it and pushing with such weight that gravity seemed to distort.

Her fingers tapped.

Her eyes that gleamed like the light of whitecaps on a stormy sea turned to them and she smiled, and it was an unkind smile.

"Ah, the Kaioh family. What a pleasant surprise. And all of you here, too."

Kaioh Toyotomi froze.

"What are you?" His question was wary, hostile, and leavened with fear that made the monster in the chair seem to almost take a rapt breath as if his fear were both draught and balm to the soul.

"I am the Ocean, Kaioh-chan."

His eyes glared. The disrespect was made three times worse by the superficially saccharine tone to the monster's voice.

"Chan? Woman, I'm twice your age!"

The creature laughed.

"Humans. So fragile. So....weak."

The tapping on the table stopped and he was horrified to see little craters torn in the wood, and that the table itself was ragged.

"You should know," the monster said as it tapped its head, with hair of such achingly familiar hue, "that she can see all of this. She is screaming within, telling me to overcome the Dark Kingdom and its works, to re-attain the light of our Princess, to not become a monster." She turned that cold and inhuman serpentine grin to them. "But she is not telling me to spare you."

"You....know Michiru?"

"Oh yes. She is my host. A fragile and weak thing, a _human_." The creature growled then, a tectonic sound that seemed to make the house rattle. "She loves you still to some degree, insofar as the emotionally crippled thing you called a daughter is capable of such emotions. But not enough to beg me to prevent what I'm going to do to you all. You see, when you cast her out, to live on her own, you left her subject to only the voices of the monster, of the _soldier."_ The creature grinned. "A being that was once nothing more than the atom bombs of the United States, save that I could move and speak and think, superficially, like a human being. With a child, all alone."

The beryl-stone pulsed with dark energy. "Back then, though, I had a conscience, a purpose. Find the princess, save the world. Then the Dark Kingdom took that away and I destroyed the ones who did that to me."

Her smile became broader, more unhinged.

"That little girl, the little rat who is host to something that.....well, very much is not...." and she gestured to herself. It was true. Michiru had been nine when they kicked her to live on her own, giving her enough money she could live in an apartment and someone sent to check on her with less and less frequency as she'd adapted, and would have been just shy of fourteen now. This was a woman of indeterminate age, but approximately in her mid to late twenties, and her hair seemed more an aqua-tinged seawater flowing down her shoulders than true hair, "she hated that. She was alone with her nightmares and the being that brooded in them and caused them and it got worse when I awoke."

Kaioh Toyotomi halfway expected a giggle then but the creature that looked at him looked surprisingly stoic, only slight moisture in her eyes.

"And now I am here. She cannot live as she does, not on a fraction of the family's wealth, and after what it is that I intend to do, she will not have her one obsession for Serenity is weak. She is weak and foolish, yet she is as addicted to me as I am to her and if I am to mold her, reshape her..."

The woman did laugh, a single sharp pained note as she hit the beryl stone with four great blows, somewhere between self-harm and trying to crack the stone and yet the stone resisted, though there were small shards of it that flaked off from the blows.

"Then I will need that will activating exactly as intended."

A violin of magickal nature formed on her shoulder and the woman in her twenties smiled a grin achingly akin to the Michiru who predated the nightmares.

"I wonder what it will be like, to be forever young and to retain in perpetuity the power to shatter buildings and to command that which pervades three quarters of the world's land surface in perpetuity?"

She grinned.

"That will be my life. And you, children of Earth, of the world that plunged nine into darkness and left a castle of bones because you were spiteful and selfish and believed the lies of Chaos, you will know the nature of fear."

And then the violin began to drone with music and there was light.

The Aoyama Ward street the Kaioh house was located smack in the center of the street, as a house that could not be missed recorded a shining flash of light and a terrible roar, and an incongrous sea odor akin to that left by a tsunami. The Kaioh house ceased to exist, everything in it obliterated save one thing, a painting of a Sailor Senshi standing with gauntlets in a sea of blood and hands dripping in blood. Other houses lost windows or saw parts of their fronts fall off, and a great crater was blown in the street. The strangest bit was that there was an impression just before the flash of light of, of all things, violin music played on a violin of quality even better than a Stradivarius.

From its ruins, as people fled into the most earthquake-proof portions of their house flowed blood, the power of oceanic magic enhancing the amount to a point that it was a small puddle. A being had knelt then, beside the broken bodies of those who had been her parents and caressed the ruins of their faces, finding the blood coating her gauntlet about two inches beyond it.

A Senshi stood in a puddle of blood and nine drops dripped from each hands, the Chaos-corrupted Neptune smiling. The House of Kaioh had fallen, now it would be a simple m-

The Princess arrived, then, and took a step on impulse seeing the devastation and where that devastation had landed and fearing what it would mean for when (for she refused resolutely to accept any prospect it might be if) she cured her love. In that sudden impulse she body-slammed the other woman, and they landed in Yogoyi Park, where the other Senshi and Tuxedo Mask arrived, horrified at the sight of Neptune and her casual look of disdain to them.

"You don't understand, none of you. You are the Inners, meant to guard the hearth and the home and the heart. I am of the Outers, and one of our number has fallen never to rise again and there are no others. To remove the restraints that make us human but keeping the rest of what makes us who we are, and what we are, is to make monsters. Behold what we, who guarded the Nine Worlds, are without the refined masks!"

And she raised bloody gauntlets, even as tears flowed down her eyes and the right gauntlet continued to hammer at the beryl with now frenzied motions, her leg quivering from the impact and more shards flying off of it.

It was the Princess then who moved and caught her gauntlet, and then in an equally swift motion grabbed the other.

"Unhand me, Princess. I am doing all of this for you. A world where we shall live, immortal and forever revered! The Princess and her weapon!"

A hallowed blade tapped against the Beryl and a whisper marred by sorrow and fear echoed:

_Moon Healing Escalation._

In a flash of light Kaioh Michiru stood and then she realized that her feet and her hands were soaked in blood, and _whose_ blood it was. A wretched mixture of red and green clotted on her hands, which trembled, and she shook, then, and fell to her knees, staring in a stunned emotion. 

She wept then, letting a mask that would normally be near-inviolable outside of the gaze of Haruka or those whom she would come to see as her _new_ family fall. The fear and horror on the part of the Senshi did not change, though part of her understood, intellectually, that it was directed less at her and more at the Dark Kingdom, who had made one of theirs in their image and turned them into the being they saw before them.

The Princess knelt beside her and put her hands around her and as she let herself weep, she looked at Haruka with dull eyes.

"I know where our enemies are." There was a tremor to her voice, and a sorrow deep and abiding. There was no atonement for this. There was only the fate that awaited her. Death in the snows, shielding the twin daughters of Luna from the Queen of the Dark Kingdom.

The Senshi went with her to the Shrine, Tuxedo Mask joining them (and his fuku along with Venus's retaining the damage from their earlier battle still). She pulled up a map and then pointed to a place near the outskirts of a former camp near the Kolyma River.

"Here. D-Point. The thing that corrupted me showed me. They're here, in the snows of Russia."

Her voice was flat, though there were trembles in individual syllables that spoke of sorrow and of wrath.

The wrath took over in the last sentence she spoke, the one that would see them take a night to rest, and then leaving in the small hours of the morning.

"There. We will go to D-Point, we will find them, and we will kill them."

The news in Japan that evening was dominated by the monster attacks on the Kaioh family and a skating rink. The youthful daughter and sole survivor of the family, Kaioh Michiru, now a house-guest of the Tenoh family, was to inherit the full wealth of her family, a fortune respectable even in US terms.

If Kaioh Michiru seemed a little more eager to go to the Arctic for vengeance against the monster that had made her into one, none dared note otherwise.

If she also seemed afraid of her Henshin and to even consider transforming back into Neptune, well....none of them noted it either, nor that when the night passed and they gritted themselves to go to the Arctic and face what lurked there behind its lines, that it seemed a group of women in their twenties and one girl in a schoolgirl outfit left for the snows around D-Point.

\-------

_D-Point:_

**_And how did your scheme work, my foolish servant?_ **

She saw the giant on her Silver Throne as she leaned forward with her fingers steepled. 

_**The Shitennou are all dead, Neptune slew all but one of your last Youma. You made a monster but did not bother to consider if you could control it. Fool! If it had been Endymion, say, you could have shown that control. The Outers are monsters no less than we, they are merely monsters beholden to the side of the angels, so to speak.** _

Metallia's fanged grin formed a deadly V. 

_**The Senshi have seen their monsters, but they do not know what awaits them. Let the DD Girls and Thetis fight first, and then move.** _

_**They will die,**_ rasped Beryl, her voice only a slight intonation higher than Metallia's on most syllables. 

**_They are reaping reward for failure._ **

Metallia grinned. **_But you, I shall ensure you get vengeance. Yourself and the Princess, alone. The way you were promised before._**

Veins of fire pulsed where she had had blood and her skin, once a human intonation took a marble hue, as her sharp nails seemed to thicken into wickedly curved claws. 

_**Vengeance, Beryl, and the completion of what was left incomplete then. Achieve this.....** _

And then she had a vision of a giant of molten magma descending from the skies and a great sword impaling the second Moon-child, the bun-headed one with pigtails, who died with mute horror at the sight and an agonized shriek from Serenity following.

_**Achieve this, and I shall take my apotheosis.** _

Beryl couldn't resist:

**_Mistress, did you ever need the energy we were to harvest?_ **

Metallia laughed.

**_No, child. Not at all. Now is the appointed time, today is the hour of vengeance, of gloom and of clouds. Come hear you nations to hear and heed you peoples!_ **

That night nightmares stalked the darkness wherever the Earth turned from the Sun. A giant of molten magma descended from the Sun, landing in Northern Russia. In its right hand it wielded a wicked blade, the harnessed power of the Sun itself, and it raised the blade and slammed it against a tiny point of light, and where the light of the Sun collided against the Moon, the Moon went out and then the blade rose again and slammed into the ground and all was darkness and gloom after a sudden sharp burst of heat. 

Nightmares stalked the darkness and there were screams and the name "Metallia" arose across the world in all its tongues.

The Sun seemed to pulse then and its sunspots formed a vast smile of dark indigo hue, and the smile turned to gaze upon the Earth, where seven mages, six Senshi and Tuxedo Kamen, and one seeming schoolgirl arrived in the Arctic. Suffering of what was unleashed could wait.

Now....now there was a fortification with interlocking defensive lines.

A fortress and in that fortress on her dark throne a Queen in a blue dress stirred and called to herself her staff.

Now she could fight and would fight, and would lead her armies in person, Metallia be damned.

What had begun in the waters of the darkness of the stygian ocean depths would finish in light and fury above the Arctic Circle, in the land of the midnight Sun.


	15. The Northern Lights have seen queer sights:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Senshi go to D-Point and the great clash in the Arctic unfolds. 
> 
> The smiling Sun shines its blessings on the blood shed, and a goddess descends upon Earth.

_The Heart of the Sun, the Silver Throne:_

Metallia did not need Beryl's orb to see, she had created the thing to taunt Beryl, to drive her failed creature to madness. To destroy her armies and to fail, purely to reward the Dark Kingdom for its calling upon her and saddling her not just with failure once, but now failure twice. She had never truly needed them, it had amused her then. Amused her to turn the weakness of love and justice, good things, into the very architects of their downfall. Now the children of the Moon and its magick were at the gates of Beryl's realm. Now, with the fall of her last failed creations and the sting of her failure washed away, the true sacrifices to bring her to Earth would be made. 

She had lied to them twice-over. Chaos was soaked in blood and betrayal, and betrayal of its own no less. As Galaxia had lied to her back in the day, so did she to them. And as with the mother, so with the daughter and her servants. Each Youma that fell broke the bounds on her powers more, and the more powerful the Youma and the Shitennou, the more powerful the burst. Metallia looked to her right and called her blade into her hand, placing it by her side as at last she stood up from her throne. The Queen of Lies would fall, the last blood offering to slake the will of Chaos, and then she would go from the Sun to the Earth, and descend upon it as a God.

Her smile was a slash of indigo light.

Beryl was so proud of herself for thinking her defiance would matter. All she had wanted was to draw her enemies and her sacrifices into the same place, for the aesthetic purpose of breaking them. From the heart of the Sun she strode upward in giant strides. Light took two hundred thousand years from the Sun's core to its surface. She made that step in the amount of time it took the deadly clash to unfold.

_Outskirts of D-Point:_

Mercury was the point woman, her visor down. Of them all she was most distant from Kaioh Michiru, who had not transformed and yet remained by Haruka's side. She could not fault her for being afraid of her transformation but in Mercury's view, if not Ami's, that was the cruelty of Chaos. It befouled the great. It had for all that not been Kaioh or Neptune but the accursed gem on her bow.

Venus was to her left, and to the rear, next to the Princess and Kaioh, quietly giving a set of orders. It was her first time to do so and where otherwise there might have been objections fueled by pride, the clash with the Youma and then the incidents that followed Kunzite's suicidal mentality meant there was only focus on the action. Venus's sword blazed with light.

Over them all was Jupiter, whose eyes gleamed with the thunder and whose presence brought thunderclouds near the abandoned hellscape of a dream of a utopia won by the sword. How cruelly ironic that in their Princess was Speed and the Seven Winds now, for that power could not be dispelled in all truth, and yet it was not her wielding such power and activating and defanging some of the more sensitive traps by her presence, it was Jupiter, whose sheer power unleashed was a sight to behold.

Next was Moon, her face more tranquil than her heart, her hand linked with Tuxedo Mask, who for his own part was resigned. He did not believe there was a chance in Hell of facing what lurked beyond this, what was erupting from Jupiter's winds, and Beryl herself. He too remembered the fall of the Old Days, if not anything else. He remembered the monster that had fallen from the skies as a giant only to be banished back to the Sun by Queen Serenity's final actions. He knew that the Dark Kingdom in those days had spoken of "Metallia the World-Destroyer" as their true kingdom.

Now they were facing the Queen and the last of their servants. Part of him wondered if Beryl had sent their strongest forces against them (and if she was sane he suspected so but was anyone sane wielding such powers as she wielded? What had happened with Neptune seemed to confirm that the Dark Kingdom was if not sane, certainly irrational and even suicidal in some of its actions).

Then there was Hino, to their left, whose power of flames burned like brilliant hallowed heat in the ice, producing melted snow around her.

And last but not least, the Princess herself, wearing her fuku, her sword out of its scabbard, and staring with shock at the lines.

She heard Venus's orders spoken with a sound like the cry of a Goddess of War more than Love:

"Jupiter, light them up!"

_Sparkling Wide Pressure!_

A vast sphere of energy wreathed by elements of oak-like bark and leaves erupted outward, slamming into the defenses, augmented by the healing power of Moon and Serenity, and by that of Venus's own sword.

Great effort had been placed into traps that were hoped would snare the Senshi and slow them down, permitting a slow and brutal attrition process beyond the vast cyclopean palace of D Point itself. In a single blast of Jovian thunder and Lunar healing-force the defenses erupted in a blinding flash of light and a crater that all of the Senshi hovered over except Kaioh, who chose to tap into elements of her Senshi physiology and leaped over.

Three miles of traps and defenses, carefully worked elements that had been prepared from the rising of Sailor V. Obliterated in a single instance.

It was at the gates of the fortress that the doors exploded outward, hurled not from without but from within, and they saw seven entities staring at them. Four were Youma of a multi-colored facet, working as a team. Another commanded small waterspouts in front of her with a wicked grin.

And last of these but by no means least was the pallid fire-veined form of Beryl herself.

**_Kill them all!_ **

It was not her voice, but the voice of the Sun that spoke from her lips, her throat blazing with light, as Beryl briefly fell to her knees, hacking up black soot-like substances with elements of viscera.

Her Youma did not care, charging the Senshi who sought to meet this in a careful formation.

Jupiter hurled bolts of thunder, and this Beryl did seek to counter, raising her staff and forming shields of dark energy that seemed to drink in the Senshi thunderbolts as a wicked grin crossed her face.

The DD Girls moved in formation, unleashing roiling waves of Dark Energy that blended aspects of a dome of protection and a semi-ring like structure with jagged edges.

With this they managed to collide with the Senshi formation before them and barreled clean through it, scattering them and shattering the formation. They leaped apart then, even as Rei Hino's flames collided with one, causing her to shriek and leap back.

The sight, however, of Venus's blood and a gasp of pain and shock when the blue-skinned Senshi transformed her right hand into a blade with a serrated edge gave Kaioh Michiru pause. She did not trust her transformed self, not anymore, and was fearful of the monster within her heart.

And yet she drew her henshin and in a flash of light Neptune too took the field, drawing to herself Thetis as an opponent in a brutal duel of Youma-water sorcery and her might of the Ocean. She became tunnel visioned on this, the clash of constructs and tsunami-scale forces against waterspouts and weaponized shrapnel-teardrops the backdrop to the bloodier duel to her right.

The Senshi in the first shocks recovered swiftly from the breaking of their formation and Venus's wounding. It was not her sword-arm that was injured and this gave Venus a determined smile as she charged straight for the one that had wounded her.

Ami for her own part sought to summon the mists to divide and to partition their foes only for Beryl to teleport behind her, and as Ami turned in shock Beryl's fist collided on her visor, shattering it and leading to a scream of pain that briefly distracted the other Senshi.

Beryl's smile was cold.

"She wouldn't let me fight," she snarled. "Not so much now. Now....." she raised her staff that crackled with dark energy.

"So perish all who stand against me."

Dark energy slammed into Sailor Mercury, who didn't even have the time to scream, merely falling to the ground in smoke and the horrid smell of burned flesh.

Beryl's wicked grin was soured when Jupiter's thunderbolts exploded the Green DD Girl, and when Thetis's water magic was starting to be taxed and even overmatched by Neptune. The damned Outer Senshi was drawing her strongest Youma and about half her intended firepower besides herself away.

Beryl watched as two of the other Youma, the blue one and the red one charged Mars. Mars launched a _Mars Flame Sniper_ straight at the face of the red one, which screeched and fell to its knees clutching at a face that gave off a horrific stench. She raised a fist in triumph and to prepare to call down a purification strike and let her guard down, as Mamoru focused on augmenting the Lunarian magicks, which in turn were seeking to slow and disorient their foes (and insofar as Beryl could not strike with as much brute speed and brute force this was succeeding, and insofar as one of the Youma, the Green one, was already destroyed it was succeeding further).

Then as she'd foreseen a blue sword ripped into her side and through her spine and Mars felt her strength fading her, a shout of _Burning Mandala_ hurling a last desperate strike of terrifying force that obliterated the Red DD Girl, and she slumped forward, her sight fading as blood dripped from a reddened mouth.

Venus gave a desperate shout of denial and rage, and sought to lunge for the blue DD Girl only to find Beryl looming in front of her.

Her smile was cold and cruel, as it had been that day years ago.

"Well then," she heard the Dark Queen speak. "Now, as then, you stand a general of an army against a Goddess in human form."

Venus growled.

"You killed my men."

"You destroyed my Dark Kingdom's activities in Europe. By yourself. But Ace, and all his works? They were but the lesser scions of a greater power."

Dark energy crackled around her staff. "I'm not one of your Senshi to be cowed and bullied by a brat with a blade, little Venusian."

_Venus Love-Me Chain!_

The chain crackled around and formed itself around Beryl, seeking to hold her in place as she gave a wicked smile.

Jupiter descended from the skies, moving toward the fallen Ami and Rei, staring in horrified disbelief.

Her eyes turned to Ami the moreso, fists clenching, and then the blue Youma scented opportunity and the last disbelieving sight of Jupiter was of a blade that carried part of her heart on its edge protruding from her body, the half-formed thought _My legs I can't feel my l-_ and then there was darkness as she fell, and the Youma waved its viscera-and-blood coated edge with shards of droplets spraying outward and smoking where they fell in the red snow.

A _Deep Submerge_ fired over a ducking Thetis smote the Blue Youma from existence.

Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter had fallen.

Venus saw that and intensified the squeeze of her healing powers on Beryl, whose smile widened further to inhuman levels and then the dark energy crackling from her staff rippled outward and Venus felt her chain _shatter_ for one of the only times in her career as a Senshi. The explosion hurled her backward and with a contemptuous bark Beryl saw Sailor Moon's hands on her mouth in horror as she saw Venus falling, and Neptune's brutal and yet graceful dance with Thetis, whose body was smouldering and decaying from the salt-edge of the power that collided with her.

Beryl moved then for Moon before Venus could react, only to see Endymion standing in front of Sailor Moon with a blazing blade of his own drawn from its scabbard.

"Ah, my old love," she crooned.

Then she placed her staff against his chest.

"Loving you was a mistake," was all she said before she hurled enough of the powers she'd gained from Metallia into him that his face swelled and became black and then his body fell bonelessly forward, limbs sprawled.

Sailor Moon howled his name in grief, as she smiled toward her with her staff raised and the power crackling along it, only for Venus to hurl herself in its path and take the blast in turn, a spray of her blood marking her fall.

Beryl huffed in discontent, even as Neptune's power unleashed a titanic _Submarine Tide Reflection_ conjured by her energetic violin that exploded Thetis's very being itself, as Beryl blurred forward and slammed her staff against a dome of Sailor Moon's nature amplfied by the Princess's own power. It was that combination that left Tsukino Usagi with a shattered Fuku and a broken arm and a leg that limped, one eye blackened, her very being haunted by the sight of Endymion and then Venus dying for her, the full memories that flooded through her overpowering.

She fell to her knees, as did Serenity.

Beryl stood before them in a blue dress, staff crackling with deadly force.

"Ill-met by moonlight, proud Serenity," she said as she raised her arms, her staff in her right hand, over a field of snow and broken bodies.

"I will give you this, with my....twice disloyal former ally at your side, you have overcome all of my Youma," grinned Beryl. "But not me. I have slain Venus and Endymion. And at last, after all the frustration, those of you who sought to hinder me are no more. Save a weakling Princess who did, at least, do her soldiers the honor of witnessing her deaths on her behalf. A traitor twice-over, to her oath to Queen Serenity, and then to her service to me. And a little lost Princess who is Spare, not Heir, forever in the shadow of the one who will resume the throne if she should live."

Beryl smiled more broadly still.

"I am the handmaiden of Metallia, Queen of Chaos. By my hand your accursed kingdom was dragged into an abyss of your own making so many thousands of years ago. By my hands at last so many of you have fallen."

Her eyes turned to Serenity.

"As I said, ill-met by moonlight."

Her grin vanished for a much more grim expression.

"Now I will give you a choice. Give me the Silver Crystal and the heart of your power, and I will restore your lost soldiers to you."

Serenity froze for a moment, her cropped hair blowing in a gale of her own making.

"Yes, I would do it. And that's all it would take. The Crystal, the thing that thwarted me."

Serenity looked, the crystal on her bow gleaming. She stared indecisively. 

Beryl's staff began to crackle with energy as she raised it and held it like a firearm, using two of the tines as a crude equivalent of a scope. She placed her blade right at the Princess's eyes.

Neptune saw the intended shot and summoned her violin and hurled a string of _Submarine Tide Reflections_ at Beryl, four of them that collided with her with force sufficient to throw off her aim, the bolt exploding in a vast crater akin to a major nuclear strike just off the side of Princess Serenity, whose indecision faded then as she raised her own blade.

Beryl roared in anger, then, and strode forward.

Neptune stood then, proud before her Princess. This was her redemption for what had happened, for the fall of her conscience and the unleashing of the monster never fully buried at the heart of the Outer Senshi. The monsters were dead and the younger sister of the Moon held onto the other, her broken arm at an unnatural angle, a Queen of Darkness in a blue dress moving with a staff crackling with terrible energy.

"Ill-met by moonlight, proud Serenity" she said once more as the Moon rose over what was now nighttime, and its light illuminated her and cast a long, unnaturally so, shadow across the ground of broken bodies.

Light formed across the Staff, in truth an Unlight for it obeyed properties no kind of light could or would under physics, light with terrible jagged edges.

She stood proudly and held her hands before her in an X-shape, bracing herself. Redemption in the snows. A life for lives worth more than her own.

The attack lanced out spearing her in multiple places and she felt the loss of sensation in her arms, legs, spine, neck, slumping onto her knees, staring blankly. She couldn't move her body enough to register anything beyond a last word spoken, valediction and she prayed, to whatever deity heard the prayers of Senshi. Her blood poured onto the snows. The Moon giveth and the Moon taketh away, accursed be the name of the Moon.

She did not hear the agonized whimper of her name, not Neptune, nor any Senshi name, but _her_ name from Serenity's lips, nor the laughter that began to echo from Beryl herself.

"Give me the Crystal, little Princess, and I shall restore to you the one you love most."

The memory of the last time such power had _touched_ her love meant the initial indecision faded and Serenity drew her blade, which crackled with Moon energy.

She touched the flat to her sister's arms and Sailor Moon gasped in shock and awe as she felt her wounds healed in a small demonstration of the Crystal's full powers.

Beryl growled.

"No."

Then she lunged among them and her ill-gained power collided with the natural blessings of the Moon and the Galaxy Cauldron. It was a clash on more than purely physical levels, it was metaphysical and it was magickal and it was the very fabric of the Universe slamming into itself and to its counterpart in arcs of energy that was not truly Darkness so much as the Nothingness of Chaos itself and Light that was not truly Light so much as the very essence of the Moon Kingdom that had fallen.

At one level it was a woman whose staff crackled in whirling arcs of darkness and blasts of light and darkness that slammed into bolts of light from Moon and sweeping arcs of healing majesty from Serenity. It was combat at speeds too fast for human eyes to perceive beyond warring energies of light and darkness, beyond the growing tempests of the seas and belated awakening of the Russian strategic defense that sought to unleash a desperation protocol. One of their most powerful weapons, the newer atomic weapons would be launched at whatever this was.

In truth there were those in Moscow who were not unduly dismayed the former camp near Kolyma was being wiped out as just part of the collateral damage even if it meant part of Russia would no longer be visible on the map, but this was not expressed privately in words or writing, let alone publicly.

It was a fight of desperate and endless Hate seeking to destroy its antithesis, a mad Queen of Shadows who had supped of forbidden powers, and the heirs of a fallen kingdom, but in her full unleashed desperation with nothing to lose, Beryl's power was a thing to behold and at last she formed a great spear of shadows from the edge of her blade and slammed it into Sailor Moon, who made a sudden sharp desperate sound of pain, impaled and lifted overhead in a triumphant gesture akin to a dance. Beryl's grin met Serenity's then, only for a shout of _Moon Healing Halatation_ and a sudden blast of desperate healing force to smite her as she had smote Sailor Moon, and in that sudden awareness of a gaping _hole_ in her being Beryl's last thought was:

_Metallia, why have you forsaken me?_

She fell, her power dispelled, but Serenity's own power and that of her sister combined to preserve her strength enough. 

Enough that when the Sun _pulsed_ and suddenly there was light in the night side of the world that could not be, there was still a Sailor Moon left.

Enough that when a giant materialized in Earth orbit, a being with an indigo smiling mouth and a body like molten magma, drawing a blade that blazed with the heart of the Star from which she had supped for millennia, she remained herself to see that sight, to see the thing descending on Siberia like a terrible God out of a horror tale, indigo V of a mouth gnashing with serrated teeth.

Enough that when the thing made planetfall, with an impact that unleashed tsunamis worldwide and its hand grasped the missile fired toward it and it hurled the missile into its great gulf of a mouth in contempt, swallowing it and relishing the heat of the blaze in its belly, she stared in stupefied incomprehension.

**_Now we come to it, Serenity. You and I, just as it was so long ago._ **

The blade in the beast's right hand descended with a terrible downward sweep and Moon spent the last of her strength in a desperate shield to prevent the impact, and her shield smashed and shattered on the point of the blade, and then it came down and Sailor Moon knew only a sudden wrenching moment of heat and then darkness rose to swallow her. 

**_Behold that which is my birthright, the power and nature of my world, the Realm of the World-Annihilators!_ **

The blade now rose in the air as Metallia spoke dark benedictions of Chaos, promising ruin and nothingness, only the end of all things.

Then it slammed into the Siberian permafrost and a sudden sense of heat erupted outward and in a flash of blinding light there were only two beings left living on Earth.

One a giant the size of a mountain with a proportionate sword to match, the other a small star that gleamed the more brightly in the ash of a lifeless Earth. The only sounds left were Serenity's weeping at the sense of the realization of her failure and Metallia's pealing thunder-like laughter, glutting the maw of death on all that was or would ever be on Earth.

Then Metallia turned her gaze straight to Princess Serenity and with a wicked grin she raised her non-sword hand and fired a simple spell of illusions at her.


	16. 'Doom am I become, dealing Death to the worlds, engaged in devouring Mankind.'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Galaxia the Soul-Taker targets her first harvest, the Alpha system. 
> 
> Princess Serenity faces Metallia's labyrinth of illusions.

_The Alpha System:_

In the long span of time since the clash with Queen Serenity Galaxia the Soul-Taker had become a name redolent with horror but also with myth. It was known that around the Heart of All that Is there was a long and empty element of space where Senshi were not reborn, where there was but darkness in all-consuming factor. Worlds sterilized and the magic dead. The Alpha system, some three thousand light years from the Galaxy Cauldron and twenty-one thousand from Earth and its star, was the first to learn that the old legends of horror were all too real. 

It began when a vast flagship materialized just beneath the Oort Cloud of the Alpha system, two inhabited worlds ringing a small star cluster, a spartan and stoic desert-world. The Senshi here wore armor, if not to the same overly militarized fashion as the Soul-Harvester, and their nature reflected the harsh sun-baked element of the worlds that gave them birth. Theirs was a kingdom of two led by a Queen who was quiet, stoic. She had felt the power leaving from the Galaxy Cauldron as she'd felt its vengeful exorcism of each and every Senshi or Senshi aspirant in the light years ringing them. Thousands, no.....tens of thousands dead. Their souls locked in the star-seed in the Vault of Heaven, where souls remained locked in an everlasting silent scream, longing for death but unable to die.

The outer world, with its Senshi Gamma, had but one Outer Senshi relative to the three of Earth. As with her Earthly counterparts she was a figure of finest destructive force, but unlike the only one resurrected and spared being haunted by fear of that which lurked within her by the red snows of the North, she was a diplomat, or tried to be. She had hailed the starship out of simple ignorance, the design archaic. No living Senshi used such a design, even the half-legendary kingdom tens of thousands of light years away under Queen Serenity, who had fallen with her realm in the Night of Long Knives, and the Fragrant Olive realm under the new and inexperienced monarch Kakyuu had not used such a design. It was a hulking thing, rugged and militaristic and on it there was a symbol. A golden gauntlet clutching a blade.

Her Queen had reacted with a visible aura of fear at seeing that sight projected to her and had tried to warn her, but she had dismissed the warning when the starship suddenly unleashed a single bolt of golden energy. Headlong her ship fell and she survived it with a broken leg, one she wielded the full nature of her power to move stiffly. She could heal, she would heal. This.....

Then in a flash of light the Golden Queen appeared, blade at her side, and she saw the cold eyes and colder smile of the Soul-Harvester. 

The woman did not even deign to use the blade, holding up the back of her left hand and a bracelet that lit with a brilliant golden light. That light was the last thing Senshi Delta saw and the Queen of the Alpha system wept to feel the sudden obliteration of her world.

Her twin Senshi, both sharing elements of her world's power and needing to work together to work best, Alpha and Beta, transformed in a flash of light. The sight of the death of the Outer Senshi haunted them, but it was a given that the monster that teleported back to her vast ship would come here. Their world's defenses activated in full this time, a web of death of overpowering nature. The flagship of the strange entity that had obliterated that world appeared _behind_ the wards, neatly bypassing them with trivial ease, and Galaxia set auto-turrets empowered by the combined power of her Vault of Heaven to fire, knowing that the defenses would cease to matter when the Queen fell.

In light the Golden Queen manifested. She did not take a form of mocking kneeling here, she seemed to descend as an angel of fire, relishing the burn of an atmospheric descent. Lesser beings would have been burned to vapor.

She landed with a terrifying boom that shattered the outskirts of her planet's capital, Sanctuary.

The Golden Queen, the Soul-Harvester, Galaxia. The fell figure in golden armor with a crown who had broken Senshi across the Galaxy in a long and terrible set of rampages. The thing that went bump in the night. Now real, and the sheer _impact_ of her presence was as a dull and salted blade worrying at her skin with the patient attentions of a sadist.

The Golden Queen smiled, then, a single cold grin that showed no teeth.

Again she raised her blade and this time she sought to wield it, as its power animating from her own and elements of the power that she sought to amass the power to destroy flashed out.

_Galaxia Shock!_

In electric lightning-fire there was a blast that wrenched that world dry of life, save two people, preserved by being unknown to themselves those who could have held the star-seeds of Senshi had the Senshi fallen. On that world there were now only three beings that lived and gutted and shattered cities of exploded buildings and shards of bone and entrails. 

Now the Golden Queen moved in a blinding speed, and Guardians Alpha and Beta took their positions at the front of the palace to shield their Princess. Such _power_ in what moved to them. In a single blast of power it had destroyed one world and then pulled that power enough to spare them and their queen, even as they were now protectors of nothing, caught in a failure that would haunt them steeply. The Golden Queen appeared before them as a brilliant flash of light like the caged power of a star in human form, blade at her side, and then she did bare her teeth, raising her left hand and sparking blasts of lightning lancing out, ripping clean through the wards near the palace, causing eruptions of power and fire and fury.

Guardian Beta caught the brunt of one blast and was hurled against the walls, the impact causing her to bite her cheek and blood to flow, staining her teeth red. And the storm moved to them, careful steps, one by one, almost bored.

Guardian Alpha leaped at the Golden Queen, who gave her a look of contempt and then grasped her by the throat, holding her still even as Alpha's powers crackled up and down her body. With a malicious smile the Golden Queen slammed Alpha into the ground, not once, not twice, but seven times, then hurled her into the walls of the Palace with sufficient force that the bones of her right femur protruded from her legs and Alpha fell in a semi-boneless spiral.

Guardian Beta bellowed her attack, a small spray of blood erupting from her mouth as she did so:

_Delta Light Storm!_

Guardian Beta watched with bloodied teeth as the greatest attack she could wield hurled toward the onrushing storm in golden armor. She smiled at her. She _smiled_. Their world was in ruins. If any survived, they were deeply hidden, or near-Senshi who would never awaken, now.

Spirals of light in the form of small shards swooped in a circular pattern to the Golden Queen, who raised her sword in mocking salute and then opened her arms wide.

The Soul-Harvester felt the full brunt of her attack, her head cocked at an angle, a cold smile on her lips.

“Is that all?” Her question was mocking, and Guardian Beta saw Guardian Alpha crawling toward her, her leg too badly shattered by her close contact with the Soul-Harvester to let her fight easily, or well.

Galaxia then moved forward again, blade in her right hand, extended outward. She was the living image of the executioner moving on the gallows, reaching for the lever. Her steps were light and yet the universe held its breath.

Then her eyes flickered to the rubble. Two women, both with pale hair, one blonde, one platinum blonde.

Galaxia’s smile became feral.

“Survivors,” she said in one of the few words not associated with her attacks that the Senshi had heard from her.

“Good. This is always so much better with witnesses.”

Her blade flashed with a terrible power, not that of the force she sought to destroy and to outmaneuver when the time was right, but her own. Golden as her armor, it was the light of unforgiving stars, the radiation that seared and left things blackened and molten. She had the hilt in her hands and the edge of the blade was pointed downward, as Guardian Beta looked up in fear.

She didn’t realize until that moment, with her eyes looking at a gleaming blade close to her face just how *fast* Galaxia the Soul-Harvester actually was.

Then the blade came down.

And there was silence. Galaxia turned from the fallen Senshi whose star-seed gleamed in front of her with a cold and malicious grin, and then walked over to Guardian Alpha.

"Don't kill her!" She heard the angry, even agonized scream of the system's monarch.

"Now you show up," Galaxia said with a cold aura of menace to her voice.

"They died in your name."

"That is their function. Senshi are weapons, but they are people, too. You killed them in cold blood."

"They are weak, little Princess. They are not worthy the power they hold."

And as her gaze turned toward her she fired a bolt of lightning at Guardian Alpha that saw her star-seed shine, and then the two women were there, trying foolishly and bravely to stand in front of their Queen.

Galaxia raised her blade and then in a single overpowering motion hurled it forward, and it was as a woman impaled to the left of her throne that the Queen of the Alpha system died, her name unknown and unconcerning to Galaxia, who savored the fullness of the moment.

The two women saw her call her sword back, stained in the blood of their queen, the drops falling to the floor.

"Yes," they heard the voice of doom speak in an archaic tongue of unknown origin. That they understood her at all was a small element of Galaxia's magic, extended to deal greater fear by comprehension rather than alien aspects. At least for something like this.

"You two have promise."

She pointed to the Senshi before them.

"I can give you the power that is your birthright, but to get it, kneel before me, Know me as your Golden Queen."

As robots the two women knelt, and then bracelets formed around their right wrists, golden and marked with the fist-and-sword sigil of the Shadow Galactica.

"Rise, my Guardians."

Psi and Chi rose, their eyes dead but their faces marked by over-wide shark-grins, skin pulled tight and giving them almost a skeletal appearance.

"Come, I have such sights to show you."

And in a flash of light the first of the Animates left two worlds, broken, the corpses of the Senshi and their Queen left as monuments to the return of the Soul-Harvester. These were but the first. There would be four more of her Animates to recruit, fools deceived by weak bargains who would soften her enemies and expose their strengths, and then she would descend from the stars. Then her blade would flash, and there would be new elements taken to her Vault of Heaven. Behind her followed her living dead, as she grinned.

\--------

_The Illusion-Labyrinth:_

She would come to call it the Warren of Dreams, in the rare times that she could be made to speak and to tell this tale. Only one of her Senshi had some inkling of this truth (and her keen mind came to grasp this of her and not understanding the nature of the fetters set and how fate, time, and a child's kindness would lead to profound alterations there would be bitterness and anger that sowed the seeds of a rift between the Princess and most of her Outer Senshi) though she watched with eyes of deep sadness from the Time Gate. The Old Queen forebade her to leave, and the New Queen would grant her freedom when she became aware of her existence but she was not yet, and then would come to misunderstand her fetters and....

She closed her eyes, for less than a second. The Guardian of Time held her staff in her hands and watched as her Princess found herself alone, at first, in a vast and infinite blackness.

Voices echoed in guttural demonic snarls and wails, some of them. Others were the voices of her Senshi, the younger girls cautiously seeing something of friendship.....and Michiru, who had elements of being so much more. Those voices, even Michiru's, she bore with as much stoic element as she could (which was not altogether much, for her body trembled and her eyes darkened with tears and guilt, such dreadful and terrible guilt). It was the warm and loving voice of Usagi that cut still more deeply, as did the basso voice of Endymion.

The spirit that had fallen from the Sky and slain all that was on the Earth and in the air, and under the high seas was her goal. In infinite darkness, she was alone.

 _No,_ she heard Michiru's voice. _Not alone, never._

Voices mirrored them, her Senshi and the Prince of Terra and she let herself believe in the soft words of support and love, and raised her blade. 

_Moon Twilight Flash!_

In the darkness of the illusions there was light and the first portions of the Labyrinth fell. 

Metallia's laughter echoed, low and menacing like peals of thunder. Her blade shone with the moon's light and she could feel the voices of the dead behind her. For them, for their honor. Step by step she moved forward, and then she saw the next scene in Metallia's set of illusions.

Tokyo in ruins, a rain of severed hands and feet, the Senshi's skins hanging on clothes lines like a parody of old customs.

A being striding in an ocean of blood with aquamarine hair, holding the severed head of her father.

_All for you, my beloved Serenity. You....and only you._

The thing that was to Neptune what a ravening rabid tiger was to a house-cat gave her a sepulchral grin. 

_A world without Haruka is not a world worth saving._

The head fell, and Neptune raised her arms and spread them wide. 

_Come to me, my love. What are these spirits, these lesser entities? We are gods, above them and able to give them immortality or to slay them with impunity. We propose, they dispose._

_And it is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven._

She had seen what Neptune had been made into with that beryl-stone. Seen the bodies, seen the destruction. Yet she'd seen the hand hammering the stone, knew what that truly meant, and felt nothing but a sick disgust and anger. 

"I know Michiru," she said low and rumbling. "You are no Michiru."

The creature that strode toward her was now a reeking corpse, tendons holding the face partially together with balefire eyes and parts of the body rotted to diseased-looking bone.

_You will not serve in Heaven, so you will reign in Hell._

Serenity growled. This obscenity, next to the sights of the true-dead, of those who offered their lives for someone who could never, ever deserve such a sacrifice....

She raised her sword again.

_Moon Healing Escalation._

The sight withered and more of the Labyrinth cracked and for a moment she smelled the terrible corpse-odor and saw a vast and towering giant that rose against the night sky like a mountain, blade gleaming with Hell-runes. It was a moment's sight and nothing more as the illusions returned. 

_Now she was striding through a shining palace of silver and gold, and saw the old Queen as she had been once._

_Her hand grasped her short hair with a painfully strong grasp._

_"You demean yourself," she heard the low hiss. "I expect you to wear your hair properly." Haruka whimpered as the sympathetic pain of the grasp made part of her own scalp burn as the old Princess's had._

_"Like this," as she tapped her right odango with her left hand. "Long. And in a proper dress."_

_"I don't want to."_

_Queen Serenity whirled around and then she was slammed against a wall with devastating force._

_"I did not bring you to life, my Cauldron-Born, to have you defy me so."_

_She glared. "I am my own person! Your daughter! Why do you do this to me?"_

_She was pressed more brutally into the wall and she whined in pain._

_"Because my kingdom needs a woman in my image. I went to the Cauldron and faced the Soul-Harvester and gained two souls of my own."_

_She fell to her knees, winded, streaks of red running down her back where the brute force had assaulted her._

_"You are a Princess, Serenity Small-Lady. Your body is not your own, nor is your life. I found my child from the Heart of all that Is. You will have to do it another way."_

_Her mother's gaze was cold, and so was the stillness in her voice, which betrayed none of the deep rage that was clearly present in the ways her mother's fists trembled._

_"And that means I shall have to seek more broadly. The Terrans.....their Golden Crystal belongs to a man, and were it not for the strain between ourselves and the Terrans you would be betrothed to Endymion and Silver and Gold linked. But it is not so."_

_She held herself, the blood dripping down her back, and the Queen was gone. Then there was a sense of time distorting and twisting and a tall woman with light brown skin picked her up and cast a spell of healing on her back and leaned in to whisper words of counsel._

Serenity blinked, eyes watering with tears, sword shining.

"My mother is Tenoh Amara. Queen Serenity has cursed me with power that I do not want. She was cruel, but it means nothing to me if she was cruel or kind. She is not my mother, and she will never be."

_Moon Healing Escalation._

And more of the Labyrinth fell and the giant was more towering than it was before. She was closer, and moving to the heart of the Labyrinth. 

She was walking on snow now amidst the broken bodies of her friends, and a smaller version of the giant stood where Beryl had stood, a being of molten power and sick Nothingness where the magma-element was not.

**_So falls your kingdom twice-over. A Queen too strong to be ruled and too weak to rule, and a Princess who shuns her destiny heedless of the cruel gaze of Chaos, which turns not from its own duty._ **

**_You may despise your destiny, Princess Serenity, but it is you and you are it. Not a child of humanity born in its pathetic weakness. So easily tempted they were. Stirring up envy in them of the immortal Star-Queens. Promise them power for power and they do not question what it is to know such things, what would make those offers. What voices speak from the light of the Sun._ **

Metallia laughed.

_**Such a cruel thing it was, to be an ordinary human in those days on any of those planets. The Star-Queens and their Senshi spawn lived lives of ten thousand years or more, if they lived so long, and the Lunarian family longer still. And next to that the vast majority were born and aged and died as they do now. So came it to them to be tempted to match a power they could not comprehend and did not want to comprehend.** _

_**You could have done this, you know. Made them all immortal, given them lives and honor and splendor. Give them lives as long as your Senshi and their Queens, there was nothing to it and your Crystal, that little gem that's in that bow of yours, it is more than capable of the deed. You could have purged them of their evil inclinations and given them an everlasting paradise.** _

_**Your ancestors chose not to, and in that sign of mortality and its miseries and the ever-hungry grasp of golden-eyed death your kind were destroyed.** _

_**Beryl was but my mechanism to fulfill the Curse.** _

"The Curse?"

**_Hnn. Your mother did not tell you that tale, so I shall not either. You and your kind are all a Curse as is. Splendid immortal monarchy indeed. Ever-young and living in gilded cages, detached from all that is or is ever going to be._ **

The monster smiled at her. 

_**Hence why a realm of tens of thousands of years fell in less than a century. A swift sowing and a great harvest and all of them alike marking my grand triumph. You are the defeated, I the victor, and it will always be so. I am Chaos itself.....and Chaos always wins, in the end. All empires die, and fall sickly, and into ruin. There is but one great lie, and it is to say 'this is it, it is finished, now all that is to be done is done. Now there is to build a crystal palace and to sit behind it, and fatten on golden thrones. Now, the lie says, 'all is safe.' All conquerors and all little Moon Queens in boneyard palaces are liars.** _

Serenity glared.

"You killed my friends and everyone on this world."

**_That, little Princess, is Chaos. Life is an obscenity that should not exist in a world refined and beautiful and subject to the elemental chaos of physics, of the birth and death of stars and the towering changes of climate and the very material fabric of existence. That is Chaos in its purest form. Life seeks to impose Order. Order. No fouler concept in any tongue._ **

**_I was a Queen before I met your little witch, and was exiled by my own King for attempting to incite a rebellion against him. And so I brought down another kingdom to prove a point._ **

Metallia strode forward and her blade ignited with the power of a compressed caged star, the ground cracking with the gravitational distortion. 

_**And now I shall kill you.** _

"My life may be worthless, but it is not yours to take," growled Haruka. "I will meet a noble death, fighting for a righteous cause. This? This is a petty vendetta." 

The monster that strode toward her raised her blade and Serenity's own eyes lit with a brilliant power.

_Moon Princess Halatation!_

Light erupted outward in a shining sphere that cracked the illusions, which erupted in a shower of shards of energy that sliced into Metallia's body and the gigantic Sun-Queen roared, a sound to lodge fear in the hearts of all who felt it. 

Her illusions had fallen, and yet there was, mountain-sized and raising her sword, which began to ignite with the power of Chaos, now, not the old power that she had wielded. It was a dense thing of Unlight that crushed and deformed reality where it was held and where it moved.

Her height and bulk was such that the very stars seemed to hide from her, and against her there was a single tall woman clad in a dress, gritting her teeth and accepting only that she would face the monster as she was and let other things go as they would.

The towering giant of the Nothingness smiled and then the smile slipped for a second.

The woman in the dress held a small object akin to a diamond. It was almost insulting to her sheer weight and bulk and yet it was Serenity, even as her hair lengthened and she felt an impulse to quite literally rip it out, who gritted her teeth. She would bear this burden for now. For now, there was facing the monster and avenging the people who died in her first rampage, and in her second.

"Empty chairs at empty tables, now my friends are dead and gone," a single melancholy line of a musical she'd seen with her mother. The only thing she'd seen in English. Those lines had stuck with her most, and then she heard voices. Not the weak and stunted things of the illusions, but spirits. Shining and powerful ones, of which one placed her hand on her shoulder, her hair and eyes a shining aquamarine.

_Never alone, love. We are with you._

And then she saw them all, the spirits of her Senshi, her younger sister at her left as Michiru was at her right. 

_Michiru is right, Ruka. You are not alone. We are beside you._

She closed her eyes and knelt for a moment, and then her crystal began to shine more brilliantly and the great blade of Nothingness descended toward her as it had toward her sister, Metallia's endless smile replaced by a sudden stoic expression that did not do a great job of hiding the all too existential fear that pervaded her at the gleaming light. The Nothingness descended and the light of the Moon rose against it, and she felt herself drawing on the collective will and hearts of her Senshi, seeing for a moment nine gems, of different hews, that began to hover around her and to move until their light seemed to emanate into her and through her and amplified further the power of the Silver Crystal. 

_**Chaos always wins.** _

In another world of the dead, a blade of death descended upon a Senshi haunted by grief and the sight of the victory of the dark power that was within all hearts and made manifest.


	17. 'Till Heaven Cracks and Hell thereunder dies in ultimate mad fire'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Solar Queen of the Dark Kingdom and the Princess of the Once and Future Monarchy clash in a war of Unlight and Light. 
> 
> The Earth awakens from death. 
> 
> A young girl finds an ancient part of herself restored.

_The Arctic:_

_**The Earth is mine, child of Luna. Your kind have failed against me again and again.** _

The accursed light of the Crystal blazed. Its silvery touches brushed against her being, and it burned and burned and burned. She was Fire and World-Destruction and she was nothingness, and yet it burned her in ways that she did not like. Its own host was tiny, so very tiny against her immensity. And yet in her hands was the blade which she had enchanted, which had let her fulfill the Frost Giant turned Queen of Nightmares' curse in full, the blade that fell ever downward like a mountain burning in fire. It collided against the Light of the Crystal and the Princess's stern gaze, and then the blade _exploded._ Shrapnel erupted outward against her body, scoring dozens of tiny wounds into it, and her bellow of agony was one that would have drowned the roaring of a full-grown Godzilla were such a beast to have risen from the Arctic to face them.

_Senshi Planet Attack!_

A light erupted, and within that light at its core was her being. The Goddess arisen from the slumber of centuries, a blade of silver intertwining within herself the reborn star-seed of an Outer Senshi who was not allowed to die in the vision of Cosmos, given something both reward and punishment. Around it there were other lights, one of them the soft bright blue light of brilliant Mercury, her keen wisdom intertwining to ensure the combined power struck true. One of them was the soft glow of her sister, Sailor Moon, which merged with her own light, the cold light of the Queen and the warm light of her guardian a singular wave, the daughters of Luna striking at the giant that still roared from newly bleeding wounds. 

The fires of Mars and the thunder of Jupiter intertwined likewise, lighting gleaming with elements of Kanji and of oaks and leaves, stoic seer and straightforward slugging thunder-goddess as one. Endymion too blazed with a golden light that sought to anchor the other lights, and in this tapped into a small element of his own future, and he too wished as did the Senshi and the Princess to see that which had slain them in the past laid low. Beyond all these, Venus guided them, her sight and spirit manifesting to Serenity's left, the planet attack blazing with her own presence as she gave a cruel smile, that of the old Sailor Venus. Now the monster had come here. Now it was bleeding. What bled could be killed.

And at her right there was the ghost of Neptune, her mirror materializing beside the sword Kusanagi, though not yet going by that name, and her oceanic power providing the brute force to hurl the attack on the lines Venus mentioned.

The combined power of the Senshi and their princess struck the beast clean through its heart, erupting through its back in a gleaming spear of light.

_High above the Orbit of Earth:_

"Fiore, did you see that? That planet went silent three quarters of its revolution around its star and now this." 

The blaze of light erupted outward, a spear that scintillated and drew the gaze of other forces to the Earth.

"Yes, I see it, An. We shall wait and we shall see."

_The ruins of D-Point:_

The Arctic steamed with the fall of Metallia to her knees as the power within her ebbed and faded. The Nothingness seemed to break away from her with a silky laughter of betrayal and where her own fires had once blazed with a brute strength they were weak, and the emptiness cut more than most. She had once been a thing of perfect power and beauty, that which had laid low worlds on behalf of her original and true king as was the due of her kind. Now.....

Her gaze was fading as she knew the attack had won. And yet the crystal blazed more brilliantly.

_Moon Healing Escalation._

Next to her bellow it was the still small whisper of the wind on a cloudless day, and yet in a sudden and erupting power of light as the ghosts of the dead watched on the red snow with the living Princess, her body crumbled to ashes and blew away in a terrible cloud leaving a foul odor. 

And then the adrenaline faded and Serenity found herself kneeling on the red snow by Neptune's body, that of her love and her protector, who'd sacrificed herself for the sister who had died again as she had in the beginning, in the arms of the one she'd loved such that she had descended from the Moon to reshape all their destinies after childish rebellion was replaced with something deeper.

Serenity wept, unashamed, for in a world of the dead, who was there to see her weep? Her friends had died for her, and all that was left to see their triumph was a dead world where no life lived.

 _My daughter,_ she heard a soft voice, as light shone in the dead world.

She wiped her eyes, her dress replaced unknown to her by the more militaristic outfit she'd come to prefer in the old days, black boots and white trousers and a white military uniform with silver and gold engravings. Her long odangos replaced with a close-cropped hairstyle that gave her a more butch look.

_I give you the choice. You can restore the Kingdom, and awaken your Guardians as they are meant to be. Eternal and in the fullness of their strength, to fulfill their destiny and your own. Or you can give all the Senshi you know and love normal lives, and bring back life on Earth._

"What will they remember?" 

_They will think of their deaths as a dream, at first, and awaken in a normal life once more until such time as they are needed._

Serenity bit her lip. 

_Can I at least bring back what was in that castle, the ones who can be brought back?_

Her voice mirrored her mother's as the Crystal began to respond to her wishes. 

_You can._

She raised the Crystal, her power and her destiny and yet not so. 

_Above Earth Orbit:_

The aliens serving the Maikaiju Tree were the only external witnesses of the first resurrection of the Earth. From a point in the shadow-side of the world a light blazed and the dead world suddenly had a normal nighttime pattern where cities seemed to spontaneously spring back into existence, the dead who had fallen to a terrible blaze awakening in their beds or their houses, staring dumbly. Those in the daytime sphere found themselves likewise awed and in several cases horrified. The seas once more teemed with life, more than it had before for the casual ravages of overfishing of fish and of whales and all else was undone without intention from the sentimentality of the Princess. So too with wildlife, and for a time, at least, the concept of the endangered species receded in what was called the Day of Silver Flame. 

"Fiore," said the general, as she turned to the figure on the command throne. "This is it. We can take the skull of she who did this and present it to the Soul-Harvester and she will spare our world."

He leaned forward, grinning with a terrible smile.

"Yes we can, can't we?"

_Earth:_

In the new beginning, the Earth was without form and void, a lifeless rock of dead seas and empty skies and ruins of broken corpses that had been cities. And then a light shone in the darkness and separated from the darkness. What had been laid low became whole again, brilliant and restored. For a time, a blessed time, violence stilled for a day and wars were halted as the simple rush of being _alive_ animated humanity. It was the Day of Silver Fire, the Day of Peace, when the terrible blazing Fire and Unlight that had slammed into them and severed them from their flesh like the downward descent of the executioner's sword was undone by warm and tender silver light. The seas teemed, wildlife had replenished itself (even if in parts of the world it would not be able to sustain this initial moment of regrowth). The endangered species of the world were reduced by ten twelfths of their number and of that nine in ten of the restored species would retain survival beyond the list.

Life had returned, restored in silver as it had fallen to red intertwined with indigo. And for a day, in what in later years would be seen as the first glimpse of Crystal Tokyo, humanity's innate malice and cruelty was stilled as its warmth and altruism and the great joy in the simple and mundane things and simply and truly living was in the ascendancy. The resurrection had brought with it a name. Serenity, Princess of the Moon.

The Senshi, Earth's first known superhumans, the superheroes of Japan and Europe and the western part of the United States, were no longer half-legendary beings. A demon of fire had obliterated humanity and all life in the wall of Dark Flames, and the Silver Fire in turn had restored them.

_The Ruins of D-Point:_

_Life_ surged into the Senshi on the red snow, and the sensation of rebirth was not painless. In a moment that would become a shared dream that among other things would begin to call them back to each other, they looked at themselves and felt themselves. No torn flesh. No damaged bodies. They were whole again and they were alive. They held themselves and rocked, for in later years the concept of death and resurrection would not be something casual but it would be something understandable. And then when the light that shone like a second Sun descended and they saw Princess Serenity standing before them in her dress uniform, all of them, Endymion included, knelt as one. 

It was Venus who spoke the oath that the others, save Neptune, echoed in unity, lights blazing from their head. Even when they would awaken and the Crystal would give them that blessing, it would be the second of the things that would see them find their way back. The cold smile of the Supreme Commander became a warmer one, humanity creeping into her, though it became cold again and she seemed for a moment to have Aino's awkwardness.

Serenity strode toward them in her boots, as their gaze focused on her and their bodies in the bloodied snow felt so wonderfully, warmingly, amazingly alive.

She gave them a benediction and then raised the Crystal and in a flash of light six girls and one man awoke in their beds, having had the strangest thing happen to them. All of humanity had been destroyed by a wall of flame that had arisen from the Arctic. Death was the Undiscovered country no longer, for she had come for them with eyes of blazing fire and then her power had faded. It was all the news spoke of that day. She could hear it on a TV turned up way too loud, and stared as she awoke in her nightgown in her own bed, looking at her hands. She had died in the Arctic, slain by monsters, so a dream that seemed more than a dream said. Died to protect a Princess who'd faced the monster that had killed them all. Now she was here, luxuriating for a moment in the sensation of her sheets, weeping as she felt her face and the warmth and salt of her tears. 

She lived. She rocked herself weeping, and then two strange things happened. One of them was the appearance of a sword by her bedside, that shone and hummed with great power, and the other was the appearance of her cat, Artemis, who moved toward her and purred and rubbed against her, as she stroked him with that same weeping gratitude at being alive.

And then Artemis spoke "I'm glad you're all right, Mina."

Her eyes went very, very wide and then the dreams were memories and not dreams and part of her mourned that Venus never rested even if the other Senshi could.

Kaioh Michiru did not know when the light shone if she would awaken in the house of dead bodies the monster Neptune had made. If that was a nightmare, like dying in the red snows of the Arctic in a vast fortress to protect her love, and incidentally the little moon-rabbit, the second and in her view by far the lesser Princess. When she awoke she awoke in the Tenoh House, finding a newspaper that mentioned the Kaioh family struck by an attack that left them on life support, in a deep coma where absent ventilators and IV nutrients they would no longer live by her nightstand. Her hands trembled. She'd remembered a monster named Sailor Neptune killing them all, and yet the same force that had brought her from the dead had done this. They trembled and clutched the sheets around her, even if all she was wearing was a set of shorts and a tank top, because the nightmare had seemed so very, very real.

And she was not in her house, or her apartment. Where was she? How had this happened?

She saw a woman clad in jeans, barefoot, and wearing a gauche combination of t-shirt and ripped jean jackets leaning in and forward, with a worried look on her face. In spite of all else she couldn't resist a smile. She was away from the house of corpses of nightmares and the living dead in reality, with someone she had an aching feeling toward that was still unfamiliar. She was so entranced in tracing the rugged beauty of the woman that both she and that woman missed the appearance of a scintillating mirror in her nightstand, her destiny waiting for the time that she would reclaim it.

The other woman seemed relieved and smiled and the smile of Tenoh Haruka was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

Each of the other Senshi awoke, Mizuno in her house to find her mother entering her room with a worried look on her face. She was not sure of what surprised her more. The vivid dream of death in the Arctic, of pain and then of a shining light and a great living mountain that had bellowed with agony of its own making and bled a terrible greenish blood down its molten-Void-like skin, or awakening in her own bed, wearing her usual nightgown and seeing her mother Mizuno Saeko looking at her and holding her, rocking her, giving her a kiss on her forehead. It was a thing that would be frequent then as everyone, everywhere, in the daytime part of the world would take a day merely to enjoy being alive. A single blessed day. The part of her that ached to know more of this was content to be here. 

Even if she did not look forward to returning to the long days in school where she would do her best and excel and would be so mercilessly mocked and ostracized for it.

Artemis was silent and went back to his feigned meowing when the Aino clan checked Minako's room, the only one of them who didn't join in on the reassuring themselves that the others lived. They had opened the door with a deep trepidation, not sure if they would fear an empty bed or one with the broken bodies that the fires produced more. When they saw her alive and curled on herself with Artemis rubbing against her, the cat yowled for a moment and jumped off the bed as her family dogpiled her, Minako laughing a single relieved laugh with a slight warbling note. It was the most lovely morning she'd ever had since Artemis had first appeared in her life and done so as the talking cat that had changed her life, and his own, in a way neither of them had ever anticipated. 

Tsukino Usagi awoke to a normal day of teasing from her brother and felt goofy at just how much she enjoyed a day like this after the dreadful nightmare consuming her.A day where she was at home with her brother, and their life the normal brother-sister things she'd missed. Where she talked to Osaka Naru on the phone, relishing hearing her voice and the sound of her laughter. She remembered all too well that what she had experienced on the red snows of the Arctic was no dream, it was a memory. She had fought with Endymion and her sister and they had fallen once more, and now they were alive. Wonderfully so. 

Kino Makoto and Chiba Mamoru awoke as they had done for so many and many a time, alone in a place where they lacked for nothing in a material sense, but were alone in any sense with other people. There was a deep and abiding sense of relief even at this, rather than fears of bleeding out in the Arctic and knowing nothing but the dismal fear that the carrion eaters of the snow would feed on them, alone and unmourned. They spent the day at home eating noodles and watching TV, a day when nothing happened though the news and experiences of humanity's mass collective death and resurrected dominated the news to a point that it underscored the very novelties of being alive.

_Tomoe Household:_

Her father was at work on his experiments. He called it a 'portal to another universe' and he was enthusiastic about it, more than she was used to from him. But when he got that way he often forgot that his daughter existed, which in this context and this time meant that when a bright light shone in her room on the twilight of the day of Silver Fire that she stared, entranced, at a henshin that manifested, shining as something brilliant. It held her gaze and she did not notice the hologram that manifested from the Moon in her room, empowered by virtue of the resurrection and able to access elements of the material world. 

She did not see the more than vaguely sinister smile on the figure's face when she reached for the henshin and in a blinding flash of light everything changed.

_End of Arc One._


	18. Time and Time Again:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the Doors of Time, Guardian Pluto gets a visit from her friend. 
> 
> In the outer edges of the Marches of the Lunar Imperium, shadows stir as Nemesis begins to set his plans in motion.

_Outskirts of the Oort Cloud:_

The darkness of space was total and it was unrelenting save where the gleaming light of the stars broke it. It was, however, a darkness of physics and of nature and a thing that obeyed the laws of nature. The thick shadows that swallowed all light that manifested just beneath the Oort Cloud, in a loose 'north' of the planets orbiting the star Sol, however, were a thing of neither. The darkness was Emptiness, it was the Nothingness that hungered, that sought to overpower others, and to dance upon their graves. Its power echoed outward as a vast fleet began to materialize, first the smaller transports that would land vast teeming armies of Droids. This was all or nothing. This was the children of tenebrous Nemesis, empowered by the Nothingness, striking against the empty gilded splendor of Neo-Queen Serenity's Lunar Imperium. 

Crystal Tokyo had severed humanity's ties to its baser instincts. It had made men and women deathless, and without malice. It had made them inhuman, and nothing can truly be unmade or destroyed, even by the power of so formidable a witch-queen as Neo-Queen Serenity. That darkness had found its servants, who had taken names after precious gems. Sapphire, Diamond, Ruby, Emerald. Cinnabar. They had found Him, the Wise-Man of Nemesis, and he had given them power. A power that did not rely on the Silver Crystal, nor on the nature of the Moon-Witches of Luna and its attendant worlds.

A power of wonder, one that drew strength from the incompleteness of mortals. It had given them things of detritus, of dead starships blackened and destroyed in the trace of an apocalyptic war in a far distant time, perhaps traces of the rampage of the Soul-Harvester, the grim Golden Queen. It had animated them and empowered them with the essence of what their lord called the Malefic Black Crystal.

They called them Droids, after a set of long forgotten mythical tales and their living automaton servants that embodied elements of these far-off legends.

The droids stood in darkness, weapons deactivated, legions awaiting the great command.

It was not yet given, though Diamond and Sapphire stood beside a group of four witches, the fell counterparts of the Senshi, a Witch of Thunder, Hate, Fire, and Ice. Before them all stood a being in white robes of crude cotton-like cloth adorned with occult symbols. Of his body there were only two glowing eyes visible, and hands of deep shadows that held a blade in a scabbard of strange metal. The work of hands that were inhuman. The Wise Man stood at the head of his armies, a sense of pleasure there in the shadows beneath his hood. His flagship had not yet revealed itself, for it did not need to, not yet.

Neo-Queen Serenity's realm would fall, and it would burn.

The Lunar Imperium and its witches would be no more, and there would be only darkness and shadows and the laughter of Chaos ever after.

More and more starships rippled outward, a vast legion of armies meant to lay low even the full-powered Eternal Senshi of the future.

It had been centuries since Prince Desmond's failed rebellion against the Lunar Imperium and the power of the Neo-Queen casually breaking it as if it were nothing at all. The full weight of the forgotten weapons, thermonuclear power hurled against wards. The false-stars had lit and yet the Neo-Queen had dispelled them with a wave of her staff.

Then they had fled, then Darkness. Now Diamond and his fellow servants of the Wise Man had returned.

None of them knew the fell amusements rippling in the heart of Nemesis, the glee in taunting those who wished to die with what they most wished. So long had it been since the Neo-Queen had removed death's fell hand, and now.....

\------

_The Palace, Crystal Tokyo:_

"Small Lady," she heard the voice echo behind her. She turned, her bright aquamarine hair shining brightly. 

"Yes, mama?"

The figure that spoke to her wore gilded armor, more all-inclusive of the body than that of the Golden Queen, but with a resemblance that intensified more and more in later years. There was a harshness to her, deep within. A bitterness at fate and fate's hand, at what had become of Earth and of her own destiny. It was not something she often showed her daughter, for Small Lady Serenity was given all the kindness that remained and there was much of it indeed.

It was that softer voice that had spoken to her with a kindness none of her Senshi save the Queen-Consort could have truly believed there.

"Where are you going?"

"To see Puu, Mama."

The Neo-Queen crossed her arms in front of her chest, her close-cropped golden hair gleaming in the light of the Sun through the palace, reflecting from her armor. With such light, it was easy to see why some called her a God-Empress of Humanity. To her it was simply her mama's determined face.

"Puu is lonely, mama. Nobody deserves to be alone all the time."

The Neo-Queen's gaze was soft and the light faded as she knelt in front of her daughter.

"You're right, dear. Tell Puu that I am looking at a means to release her from the taboos. She will be free."

Small Lady grinned.

"You mean it, Mama?"

Neo-Queen Serenity's smile and her hope was one of the last sights that Small Lady Serenity would have of her mother, and it was combined with a hug that did not feel cold. It felt warm.

"Go see her," and then with that the Neo-Queen turned.

She did not tell her daughter that she'd felt the Enemy stirring after a thousand years. In a manner not seen since the Great Freeze and the rise of Crystal Tokyo. There was Power at work again, and if there was any place for her that was safe, it would be the Doors of Time.

She turned to see her Queen-Consort standing beside her, her hand slipping into her wife's gauntlets. Queen Consort Michiru Kaioh had her hair in a single braid, long and trailing, and wore a splendid dress of aquamarine, adorned with jewels. Her eyes, soft and understanding, were deeply worried.

"You sense it too." It was not a question, but the grave voice of Serenity, Empress of Terra and the Nine Realms.

"Yes, I do."

Michiru's nose twitched. "I wish I knew what the Old Queen knew that made her think it wise to dot that to Pluto. If we'd freed her, she would be a happier person. And......we might have had warning, Or a means to prevent this."

The Neo-Queen nodded.

"I should have listened to Small Lady sooner." 

By then her younger sister had arrived.

"Usagi," she said, her eyes flashing with a small taste of her power.

"Sound the alarm, we will begin to build the barrier."

Usagi went pale.

"I'll tell Mamo-chan."

Lips firm, the Neo-Queen nodded.

"Good. The Darkness is rising to the north, and it shall seek to come down like the wolf on the fold. We must be the unbreakable shield and the sword that nothing can dull."

The three stepped together, drawing into the Palace.

\-------

_The Doors of Night:_

Guardian Pluto stood in her long watch, witnessing the rising and falling of entire civilizations and the telescoped paths of power and glory and the decay and ruin that went with them. She saw all things, and she knew all things, for time and space were no obstacle. She had seen worlds that might have been, including those where others were the Princess Serenity and now the Neo-Queen. There were many things that could change in greater and lesser ways, but one thing for her did not.

It began when light shone in her endless mist and shadows, a light that brought with it warmth.

It continued with a shout of "Puu!"

She had frowned at the nickname before, but now it was welcome.

That shout came and then arms wrapped around her, warmth. Solidity. An end to solitude, and to the long watch in shadows and isolation, ever-seeing but inactive.

A fixed point in time was coming, when Darkness would reach out in terrible strength, and lay its tendrils upon the Lunar Imperium. A time of trial. 

That was not something to tell Small Lady now, for she would become part of it in a manner that nothing could match. For now there was a hug, there was quiet words spoken. A chair that materialized in endless shadow and darkness, and another.

Small tales told, sweet laughter.

Words that brought warmth and gaiety where there had been only the Watch.

Hearing Small Lady's excited chatter, she could forget the coming of that which lurked beyond, the gloom spilling like sickly shadows into the night beyond night.

Her magenta eyes were warm and it was no feigned warmth, no hypocrisy great or lesser. It was simply a woman relieved to no longer count among her many burdens a sense of isolation from humanity and her fellow Senshi.

\--------

_Earth, the 20th Century:_

_Juuban District, Tokyo:_

Humanity had died, collectively, and completely. So had all Life on Earth. Then the light of something warm and silvery had resurrected it. This was an incontrovertible fact. The Senshi were no longer hidden heroes in the sense of the old Moon and V and Serenity. Now they were known to have brought humanity out of whatever force had obliterated it. Old ways were in the first steps of convulsions of unpredictable nature, and none could foresee the path. 

There was still joy and gaiety, in the knowledge that death's sting had for a time been overthrown, that the Sun shone with true light. That the stars were right, and no monsters lurked within them.

Then a burning object seemed to fall from the sky in the Juuban District, caught in various cameras and by an overflying AWACs drone in joint JSDF-US Military exercises, the soldiers reassuring themselves that they were more than useless cannon fodder.

It landed in fire and fury and explosion that drew out crowds of curious seekers, who found a crater, a building that had become rubble, and smouldering fires that burned and left strands of smoke, but there was nothing to be found.

\------

_A vacant apartment near the impact zone:_

"You are certain of this?" 

Anli shook her head.

"No, An. Nothing is certain. What we saw then, the overthrow of something like that, and the something that was overthrown...nothing is certain. But if we can take the head of the Queen, we....we might spare our world from the Harvester."

An's gaze was wary.

"Why do you think she would?"

Anli's smile was an unpleasant and sinister one.

"If she is given the head of the only being to ever defeat her, she will have respect for those who could."

An shook his head.

"Repeat that more slowly.You present the most powerful being in the universe the head of a being that defeated her, assuming we can actually pull this off, and you think she'll take that skull from beings that do what she could not, and will spare our world."

Anli nodded, excitedly.

An whistled slightly. "OK, then. When this turns out to be a horrible idea, don't blame me. I tried to warn your dumb ass."

Anli then snarled and slammed him against the wall.

"You can insist this as many times as you like, An, but the reality is that if we are doomed either way, we will at least have the satisfaction of beating the undefeatable at something. If our world dies, we will die with honor and a proven sense of superiority. A death that means something. We have no winning options here."

An nodded, his face pale, his breathing becoming heavier, and then she released him.

"Now here," she pointed to Juuban High School.

"We go here, we join this school."

Then she smiled as they brought out cards.

"Our Cardians, our beings of the Tarot of Souls."

They brought out the first card.

"The Vampire."

They nodded.

"The Vampire."

An tossed it up and Anli spoke words of power, and the Maikaiju tree pulsed, its roots setting in not merely from the apartment, but through the deserted building. The two aliens grinned at each other as the being that manifested knelt before them.

"Harvest souls, Vampire. Bring the Maikaiju tree food."

The creature grinned and then leapt out into the night.

\------

In its first feeding, the creature crawled along walls like a spider, seeking prey with whom it would devour. It saw a girl walking along in jeans, paying attention to a video game and not noticing the world around her. It snarled then, and prepared to leap. It did not see another girl with short black hair and violet eyes see this, and frown. It did feel the sudden burst of energy that lanced out when it jumped on the girl, its fangs bared.

Words were spoken.

" _I am an emissary from the abyss of Death. Protected by Saturn, the Outer Planet of Destruction, the Guardian of Silence. I am Sailor Saturn._ "

The creature turned. A being strode toward it, clad in long boots, unlike most of her fellow Senshi, with a purple skirt on her Fuku. Her eyes were as violet as the skirt, and her glaive hummed with an eldritch power that hurt the creature's eyes to gaze upon. Her tread was level, and her eyes were calm.

**_What manner of thing are you?_ **

It stood up, rising to its full height, and then lunged at the Senshi only to find the sharp edge of the glaive right at its face. Staring straight into the teeth of the power that looked upon it, it froze. This.....

It hissed and then slithered away in shadows with anger, as the woman on the ground looked up in shock at the figure standing next to her.

"Are you all right?" The strangely clad woman spoke with a voice of quiet steel.

The woman nodded.

"Good." She heard the singular word from this strange being, and then it pointed to a further point on the alley.

"Go, run. It may come back."

She ran, then. The news the next day recorded that a woman from the United States, newly arrived to Japan, one Elsa Grey, had encountered a new Senshi, wielding a glaive, with hair of darkness.

Tomoe Hotaru, eating a bowl of noodles with some fish by it, smiled with an amused grin to see the sketch of Sailor Saturn looking a full grown woman, which she was not, and seemingly having something of the glowing eyed aspect of those American superheroes. That led to her make a bark of laughter that had her father looking at her curiously and then dismissing things.

Something had changed with Hotaru recently. She had gained a new kind of power and vigor, her old sickliness fading.

Shrugging, Soichi returned to his work. 

He'd had dreams of a shining place of eldritch night, a Nebula.

Something in the darkness promised him it had such sights to show him.

He wanted to find out what they were, and there were signs of progress.

Soon he would hear from this "Master Pharaoh 90" and he would find out.

For now it was a private thing.

In the past, before humanity had died and risen, the quest for other dimensions, be they nebulae or full-fledged universes, would have been dismissed as a crackpot concept. Now......now he had the full endorsement of the Japanese government.

If the shadows in his lab changed and something laughed in a low peal of thunder, finding its first bridgeheads in material reality, he did not notice.

\-----

Watching television, Hotaru felt a shadow drawing to her father's lab, a pulse of Evil that tingled in the very nature of her being. She felt the Other's eyes drawn to it, and yet she deliberately turned away. That was her father. Nothing could make him a monster.


	19. Doom for the House of the Doom Tree:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Soul-Harvester comes to the planet whose soldiers desperately hunt for the skull of Sailor Serenity. 
> 
> The Vampire finds a girl with long blonde hair and tries to snack. 
> 
> In the future, shadows gather and a barrier rises.

_Beneath the Oort Cloud:_

The ships continued to multiply as that which was not darkness but the Nothingness, the force of primordial hunger and bloodlust, proliferated and swelled and grew. It blotted out the starlight where it was, ships upon ships. The vast bulk of them were filled with the Droids, the unawakened armies that would rise when the signal was given. Ships upon ships upon ships. Even Neo-Queen Serenity, in her golden armor in her kingdom with its great Golden Throne would fall. Chaos would overtake the so-called God-Empress of Holy Terra, and the spectre of Cosmos would recede never to be born. 

The Wise Man felt his armies form, his emptiness beneath his robes sounding with a grisly sound as if of flesh peeling from bone, teeth grinding against each other. Ships upon ships, legions rising. The legions of Hell, of the Nothingness, of Chaos and its enmity to the wretched beings of the Stars. The Golden Queen had been reborn, _changed. Purified._ The obscenity had done this at a terrible price. That could not, and would not, be born. So the ships continued to grow, an army to drown the stars, and the star-mages whose power arose from them.

_Earth, Crystal Palace:_

All the Senshi were here in person, or as with Saturn, through the vision of her Guardian, who manifested as a small duplicate of her with the rest. Pluto, even as she listened to the eager stories of Small Lady was there, too, for she was a being of Time and Time was not a singular or a linear thing. It was the first time that any of them had seen Pluto in the flesh and they were awed at her sight. A woman of dark brown skin with reddish eyes that seemed to gleam in manners not quite _within_ time but _between it._ There was a _power_ that rippled out from her that only the Neo-Queen and her sister and Guardian could match. 

Pluto's gaze met theirs and it was not that of a being truly _human_ even in the loose sense that they had been once. It was a gaze ancient of days and as new as the first stares of a newborn child.

Only Serenity and Moon could meet that gaze without flinching, even the Prince of Terra could not hold it for long.

"Pluto," it was the singular word of Neo-Queen Serenity, a voice low and resonant with power. "I welcome you to the conclave." Even now, for some of the Outers, to see so stoic and seemingly masculine a figure as the Queen using the word 'atashi' was a jolt, but it was a familiar paradox.

"The shadows are forming high at the very edges of known space. Beyond even your sphere."

Guardian Pluto nodded.

"Yes, my Queen, they are. It is the Black Moon Clan."

The Senshi stiffened. An old name and full of latent horror, and a look of haunted guilt crossed several of their faces, Rei's in particular and she could not meet her Queen's gaze.

"Here, now? The Soul-Harvester was redeemed and freed of her burden. Chaos was destroyed. How has this happened?"

Guardian Pluto was impassive, crimson eyes blinking.

Here, now, on this day of days she would speak of her duties, though her words would seem cryptic even if they were straightforward.

"Time is both fixed and it is fluid. We stand at a point of destiny. Small Lady's time of trial is coming."

The Queens stiffened, and the aqua-hued eyes of Neptune narrowed and a salt air brushed into the room.

The golden gauntlet of Serenity placed itself on her shoulder and she turned with a harsh gaze that stilled when Serenity shook her head in a single sharp gesture, mouthing the word "No."

"Time of trial?" Her words were artificially calm, the calmness that preceded the Neo-Queen's winds erupting into a ferocity and a dynamic driving force with her sword of righteousness.

"Yes," Pluto's voice was truthfully calm, even warm. 'She has found her way to the doors of time, which you have all done, once, and then never again." A shadow crossed her face and in partial comprehension in theirs. "She comes to see me and to speak to me and is there now, where she will be safe and where she will face the choice."

Now the shadow crossed their faces and it was a deeper one.

"Have faith in Small Lady, even when she makes a decision of impulse that will hinge all of fate."

Her gaze turned to the opulent Golden Throne.

"It is well for you that the throne is comfortable, Neo-Queen Serenity."

She saw the Neo-Queen stiffen and those eyes gazing at her with a power that hinted of Cosmos. She saw what was within the crimson gaze and with a deep, rueful sigh for a change it was the Queen who could not meet the gaze of one of her Senshi.

"She will manage this, then?"

Pluto nodded. "She will. She speaks to me of the frustration of almost being able to fully mature as a Senshi, to become a woman and not a girl after so many centuries. She will do that, and more."

Serenity's face was marked then with a soft smile though her eyes spoke of regret. "I could not help her."

Pluto shook her head, as the other Senshi watched, rapt. "It was never yours to do this, she must do so on her own. Your mother controlled you too much and the Silver Millennium fell to ashes from it. You give her her freedom, and Crystal Tokyo will...."

She did not wish to give away too much of the hopefulness that threaded through the sorrows. "We shall all see what shall come."

The other Senshi nodded.

"Then the barrier shall rise."

Pluto nodded. "It will."

"And I?" Saturn's Guardian, the AI that spoke from her Palace with her image and likeness and linked to her mind spoke with the cadence, crisp and austere of the Senshi whose power was awe-inspiring.

"You shall be our sword and our shield without."

"Will it be like Galaxia?"

Pluto blinked passively.

The AI huffed in a surprisingly human note with annoyance threaded and then their eyes turned to their Queen.

"Very well then, the Damocles Option it is."

Pluto vanished then in a moment where she seemed to be nine Plutos and then a woman with nine faces and eighteen arms and legs, the eighteen eyes shining brilliant red and then she vanished.

It was Jupiter whose lip curled in what the less wise would have seen as a genuine smile. "So that's the mysterious Guardian Pluto. What a wonderful woman." Guardian Mercury snorted and elbowed her.

Prince Endymion took the hand of Selene as Neptune did that of Serenity.

"We shall raise the barrier," spoke Selene who had once been Usagi Tsukino.

"Saturn will do her best to fight the armies though I fear she won't be able to stop them all." For a moment tears trickled down her face, a small trace of the Usagi-who-still-was, if deeply hidden.

"When those armies crack past, when the Great Enemy itself takes its current form, we will stand. A blade of light against the darkness."

Serenity nodded, and then she raised her own sword, moving her hand from Neptune's slightly. 

"We overcame the Soul-Harvester, even if it took much out of us to do so. We beat this foe once. We shall do so again. Together."

As one the other Senshi chorused, "Together," and the AI from Saturn vanished in a cloud of darkness with a slight charnel odor.

The sirens began to ring in Crystal Tokyo, chiming of an invasion to come, a low and mournful howl. The memory of Galaxia endured in the deathless humanity all those years and the movement to shelters was surprisingly dignified.

On the Golden Throne and its Dais stood two women, one before the Throne clad in opulent armor of gold with the intertwined sigils of Uranus and Neptune woven in sapphires and emeralds on the breastplate. To her right stood a woman in a Senshi Fuku, her hair and eyes of aqua and her power pervading the throneroom with the salt air and the pressure of Ocean.

To her left was a woman clad in a different fuku with a rainbow hue, her wings flaring into existence, smaller than the wings of the Neo-Queen, the feathers of each brushing each other. She raised a henshin, as her husband and beloved raised his cane, one that lit with a brilliant golden light, and then they spoke words together:

_Moon Crystal Barrier, Rise!_

In the darkness around the nine realms of the Earth the first walls of the barrier rose, augmented by a long spear of darkness from Saturn. There would be nine walls for nine planets, augmented by each of the Castles and the AIs that drew upon the power of the Senshi and their Queen and their Grand Duchess. Light arose in the darkness. 

_Black Moon Clan flagship:_

The Wise Man saw the barrier rising and again the grisly sound of his smile, now widening. 

The hour was coming. The last of the ships were parting the barrier.

When the last ones rose, he would give his speech and then the Darkness would slam against the Light. The Crystals would be silenced, and the Earth and its planets would again be infinite darkness and blackened heaths where the dead would rise only as a final legacy of the blessing of the fallen Queen.

_Tree-Land:_

It had a longer name in its own language, but that was not a name the Soul-Harvester cared about. What she knew of the place had said that it was a land whose power arose from the Maikaiju Tree, known in other tongues as the Doom Tree. A tree that birthed its children and had nourished them. The planet still stood, but two of its most powerful and dangerous children were gone and the Tree's power had gone with them to aid them. Yet the planet itself.....

She had her Animates, the first of them, Chi and Psi, with her. She could send them with her to rampage and to wreak slaughter if she wished but she did not wish it. This was _her_ fun.

From her flagship she fell as a burning torch, reaving a line of fire through the skies, her sword extended outward and adding an aura of menace. Her presence was of a magic strong enough that elements of the tree sent forth tendrils to oppose her. Her lip curled in a contemptuous sneer and her power extended outward, and the tendrils dissolved.

In an impact of fire and dirt and magma she landed,, the world rocking with that power.

The Doom Tree priest stood before her.

"We have sent our best under the very eye of the Makai Tree to make you an offering and a bargain, Soul-Harvester. The skull of Serenity,for our freedom."

Galaxia laughed in a peal of fire and thunder and doom.

_**You know enough then of the legendary clash between myself and the fallen Queen of the world called Luna. You offer me a skull of the only thing in a hundred thousand years I have not crushed outright. If you had the power, or I thought you had the power to succeed I would not have even made planetfall, merely obliterated you from orbit before you knew I was there.** _

Laughter silenced, then, and the laughter became a vicious guttural snarl.

_**But you do not have that power. I was considering recruiting one of your kind as an animate. For the kind of hubris you've shown here in daring to make me this offer?** _

Lightning crackled around her gauntlets.

**_You no longer exist._ **

That was all she said and then there was a flash of light and the world of the Makai Tree erupted in a silent boom in the endless Void where there is no sound nor gravity, the planet become a vast asteroid field. In the rubble and hardening magma that had once been a world, Galaxia blew a bit of the dust of the now-extinct inhabitants from her gauntlet and snarled, teleporting back up to her ship.

 _ **Set a course for Planet Mau,**_ and her Guardian AI, a small being with red hair in tiny Odangos, complied with a quick _Chibi Chibi._

_The Apartment:_

The Doom Tree and its inhabitants felt the coming of Galaxia when the Tree creaked and groaned, its power starting to suddenly and visibly ebb as its leaves wilted. From prideful and arrogant the two last survivors felt their own strength becoming sickly. From tall and gloating warriors they had become stunted, as if childhood had risen from the sundered bones of adulthood with a too-small skull in a too-small grin. 

They gasped in ragged agonies, and then they pointed to the Vampire.

An hissed:

_Feed._

Without hesitation the Cardian complied and it slipped into the night.

_Outskirts of the Arcade:_

Aino Minako had found herself still Sailor Venus, fighting more regular crime. That was a challenge, for what motivated crime, especially in so rigid a place like Japan, was often poverty or networks that merely appearing with superpowers did not readily disrupt in and of themselves. She could still the more violent crimes, and she had exposed a cult and its plans to unleash sarin gas in subways to trigger some kind of apocalypse. 

Princess Serenity, though not Princess Selene, could transform again, too. Well, maybe it was more that Princess Selene did not want to.

She had felt the power of something that was clearly a Senshi when the unexpected new enemy had manifested itself. A power of an old and familiar sort, laden with menace. The Sailor of Destruction.

Only one being besides the Princess or the assembled Talismans of the three Outer Senshi could awaken her. The old Queen had called the Guardian of Death and Destruction from the slumbers of time's long passage and there was nothing good in what that meant.

She had sought to catch a glimpse of Saturn, who had made the news foiling a shipment from the Russian mafia to Tokyo with a flamboyant style, withstanding a hail of bullets and quite literally hurling the ship backward with the point of her glaive against the water so hard it shattered on impact, though she had moved with speed enough to rescue, and indeed it was seen _as_ a rescue, those who had been caught in the illegal deals. All she had seen was purple eyes and black hair and a woman taller than she was (and oh did she resent that). And that _aura._

Venus stirred within her mind, power that smiled and hissed: 

_The new enemy is coming, it's been hunting us all this time._

Mina blinked and shook her head. "Quiet," she hissed at a level beneath the hearing of an ordinary person. 

_You cannot shun me so readily, not any more. Not since the snows of Siberia. You slept on the red snow and Serenity resurrected you. Now I live, as Neptune's shadow-self awoke and awoke me._

She heard the laughter rippling and it reminded her of a comic she'd read in her time in Britain. A comic with a young boy named Johnny Bates and the grinning monstrous _thing_ lurking within him. She had seen a shade of that in Neptune, too. 

She could sense the Enemy, as it clambered against walls like a spider.

 _It is coming,_ Venus gloated.

She held her henshin and spoke words of power and felt the transformation sequence that she and other Senshi could see. The strangely soothing element of her purity, her flesh bared and no sin within it. Then the armor.

Aino Minako closed her eyes.

Sailor, not quite yet Guardian, Venus opened them.

Aino Minako was a small girl, weak and slender. She couldn't even speak the proper phrases of two languages, mixing pronouns and honorifics and bungling words in a manner that was incredible to Venus, and insufferable.

She was Venus, general of the Senshi, a force in power outmatched only by the Princesses, and in raw power (but not skill) by Pluto and Saturn. Though to be fair with a power to crack a planet by simply dropping a glaive and power over Time itself, what she was was nothing, and almost anything would be. Aino Minako was a freshman in high school, with an adolescent's awkwardness and body that felt uneven even if it was not. Venus was a _woman_ tall and curvy, her blade out as her eyes seemed to show she was 'distracted' by the clumsy efforts of whatever monster this was.

The creature swooped down toward her then, a low rasping hiss of delight.

_The Doom Tree demands blood, so blood shall it have!_

Venus's smile was cold and menacing. 

All she said was a single word.

"Wrong."

Then she spoke one of her phrases of power.

_Venus Love-Me Chain!_

Energy of golden hue with a starlight aspect that gave it almost elements of lightning and electricity crackling around where it was manifested around the Vampire. 

It hissed in agony as its flesh smouldered.

"You're not very bright, are you?" Venus' tone was cold and gloating.

"You're looking for Senshi and yet here you are, facing their General. Burning before Venus's love and justice."

Venus raised her sword and pointed its tip at the Vampire's heart.

"You said something about a Doom Tree. What is it and why are you here?"

The vampire smiled.

_The Doom Tree wants the skull of the Princess to offer the Golden Queen. The Soul-Harvester shall reward us and our world!_

Venus laughed then, long and with a pained aura to it. 

"Fool! The Soul Harvester is a myth, a story told to children to make them fear the consequences of disobedience!"

The Vampire laughed then and his gaze met hers.

_We will kill your Princess and her skull shall join others before the Soul-Harvester's Throne!_

Venus gave a bored sigh, then, and then her blade stabbed with a motion so swift the Vampire couldn't even see as its inner light shone with a spear of light. The Cardian disintegrated into ashes and she watched them blow away, her lip curling into a snarl.

"Damn. I'll have to contact the Princess."

Venus blinked and in a flash of light Aino Minako stood, in her schoolgirl outfit, and Venus faded into shadows and a vicious snarl of anger that rasped like a thunderbolt following a lightning flash.

Minako scuffed her heels and then walked back to her house, her parents saying nothing much to her (and for a change she did not mind this nor the hastier element of dinner). She slipped into her room and saw the worried face of Artemis.

"Well, old buddy," Minako sighed, "There's something Sailor V encountered that we need to deal with."

Artemis's white face looked up.

"A new enemy?"

Minako nodded.

"Yes."

She told Artemis a tale of the confrontation, leaving out that Venus oozed a more malicious and thuggish element in such contrast to who she was and what she was (and it did not quite mesh with the words that the old Queen had spoken that her general seemed to embody the very worst stereotypes of the old Imperial Japanese Army). Artemis listened with a worried note.

"You said the Doom Tree."

She nodded.

"There's a world out there that was known for that thing in the time of the Silver Millennium. It was originally Doom in the first sense, that of Fate. From it the inhabitants of that world were born and to it they returned when they died, to be reborn at later times. If that species has come to kill the Princess, and has come with the Tree itself," he was silent and then for a moment he saw Venus's gaze in Minako's face and he could not resist a shiver, "then the other Senshi will awaken again." 

He shook his head. "I'm amazed he thinks the old Soul Harvester myth has any truth to it, though." 

He seemed evasive about that and when Minako asked him about the myth he would say nothing. She gave up in frustration and pulled out a couple of issues of the English comic, and turned to issue number 14, to the last pages. On the panels that haunted here there was a word spoken by a child in a terrible situation and a flash of light, then torn bodies and words in black speech bubbles.

_For a moment she had a vision of school and the swaggering bully who picked on the girl with the quasi-English accent, and letting the voice that echoed with malice within her speak with a low and rumbling power. A flash of light and the girl held her hand in front of her eyes and then Venus's smile was reflected in her gaze, teeth that should have been sharp and a hint of power gleaming around her eyes._

"You earned this," _Guardian Venus purred, and then there was a sickly crunching sound as a locker was dented and a trail of blood and Guardian Venus grinned then, and levitated in the air and flew out. So much wrongdoing in a world that cried for a general to bring it to heel._

She closed the comic hastily, the impression of a face with an over-wide smile and burning eyes and a hand reaching to the panels there. 

She placed that comic aside and picked up another one, a lighter one. Also from Britain.

As she opened the panels and saw the newest issues of that comic, and a tall and stoic older brother and his annoying younger sister. Memories and wistfulness pervaded Aino Minako and Venus's words were silent. With her other hand reaching out to brush Artemis, she relaxed, and let herself breathe.

Tomorrow, after school. She would find Princess Serenity and she would warn her of what was coming.


End file.
